buy or rent

Hi all I have a xfinity gatway all in one wifi 802.11 ac my speedi pay for are 250down /30up
I use a nighthawk ac3200 for wifi because it has better range
would I be better off getting a sb6183 or sb9190 modem only?
I am looking for the best performance I can get. thanks

Hi there

what are you needing to do -- huge speeds are really only necessary on things like streaming movies and even those can be sensibly streamed at 8MB /s for full 1080p without buffering.

RDP / file sharing etc if you are connected a lot - then even 54 is OK for probably 99% of stuff and for typical desktop applications might be just as good as a LAN cable.

If you are streaming to a chromecast then use the Chromecast LAN adapter -- that will give you real improvement using the chromecast rather than its wifi built in system which can only use the 2.4 GHZ band anyway so this device natively has to use the 2.4GHZ settings on wifi. The adapater only costs around 12 EUR here so probably about 10 USD for you. if in USA.

Switch your Wifi settings to the 5GHZ and select the wide 40 channel instead of narrow 20 band if your box allows it (smart phones of recent vintage don't have any problem with either) .

I think optimising what you have is better than rushing out buying a new router which probably isn't necessary as you have a decent wifi adapter in your machine.

Really fast wifi is only necessary to download mega large files at fast speed or run a server for a lot of users -- I'd think on even 30 Mb/s instead of the 300 you have you'd hardly notice much (if any) difference for typical tasks. I'm not saying it's horrible to have --far from it - but you need to ascertain what you want it for.

My main problem with ISP's is that they often offer blazingly fast DOWNLOAD speeds but Glacial UPLOAD speeds often (or usually) are 10 - 15 times SLOWER than the upload. Doesn't matter how good your router is if the upload is SLOW (unless you are totally on an INTERNAL network).

Cheers
limbo

Would it be better to buy or rent ? would the Motorola / Arris SB6183 SURFboard Cable Modem be better faster than the xfinity gatway all in one ? I don't use the wifi in the xfinity gateway. I use the netgear ac3200 for that.

Purchase is always cheaper in the long run. If you rent, you only pay the bank interests.

whs said:

Purchase is always cheaper in the long run. If you rent, you only pay the bank interests.

Hi there

While true in this case it's not always true -- if say you can make MORE money by spending out less up front than the costs of rental -- well you see how it goes --but this isn't a Financial Advice Forum so i'll leave that alone.

Suffice to say you might be better off waiting a little while until the new high speed wifi standards are regularized and ISP's roll them out.

there's a whole load of Wifi improvements coming out which should make for most domestic consumers the idea of WIRED LAN's absolutely DEAD --by all means connect a NAS box with a bit of LAN cable to the router if the NAS box is near the cable box (in most houses this tends to be near the main TV set) but hopefully the days of running LAN cables over the place will soon be History.

(Anybody owning shares in Copper companies --unload them quick !!).

BTW there's nothing to stop you even with a SLOW (i.e old B/G standard) connection from your main wireless router to then provide an INTERNAL home fast N band LAN --works fine for Local media streaming etc -- My NAS box (using an HP GEN8 microserver) has two LAN ports on it so no probs with separate networks.

(Note your primary router must then support VLAN so check before you buy if you want to do this type of stuff).

Cheers
jimbo