major boost in speed

Just over a week ago, i got a PS3 and a new TV. The PS3 has an in built wifi connection but it was struggling to stream any sort of video or media fluidly over my local wifi network. Now i could have just used cables to physcially connect the PS3 to my PC, but why bother when i know i can do it wirelessly?

The problem i had though was that my wifi router was just too slow. Fine for distrubuting a few megabytes / second for internet browsing, but not really powerful enough to manage bandwidth hogging HD videos & images being live streamed.

So i ordered the fastest wifi router i could find. A D-Link 655, costing about €90. It arrived this morning, just in time for the weekend Before setting it up and retiring my old wireless router after 4 years of loyal service, i decided to run a few speed tests and take a few screenshots of the old setup, then see if the new router made a difference.

Up until today, i thought i only had a 3mb connection. I check speeds fairly regularly using speedtest.net and also diagnostics on my local router just to make sure everything is working as it should. I couldn’t believe it when speedtest.net came back with this;

That’s a 7mb connection speed, more than double what i thought i had. I doubled checked on my local router and sure enough, it was telling me i was on a 7mb connection;

So only recently my line has been upgraded to 7mb (at no additional cost), which is a nice surprise 🙂 Sure enough, when i tried streaming live videos on the web or even just viewing youtube videos, there was zero lag and videos were downloading faster than they were playing. Just a few days ago, i was cursing my connection after it was struggling to play a live video feed for a football match. 5 seconds of continuous play, followed by a pause, followed by another 5 seconds and then a longer pause. Then the timer would jump up by about 1 minute the next time the video would play. Very frustrating. But now, those problems appear to be a thing of the past for me at home anyway. Fingers crossed it stays like that.

So that was speed boost no.1. I then installed my new router which i bought to help my local network connection speed. It went from 54mb to 130mb instantly. Although that was nice, it wasn’t quite nice enough – i knew it was capable of 300 mb, so naturally enough i tried to hit that target by messing with settings.

Eventually i got it up to 270mb which i think is as good as it gets. As you’d expect, two wireless N devices can now transfer files rapidly across the local network. Even though my PS3 or netbook don’t have ‘N’ cards in them, the difference in speed over the local network is still very obvious.

I can now stream dvds from my PC to my PS3 without any lag… bulletproof. The range has also increased using this router which alone boost performance and reliability.

Pictured above is my new router (top left), my adsl modem (about 5 years old now and still going strong despite being on 24/7), and my old wireless router which is now retired. So a double boost in speed for me today. A good start to the new year 🙂