Goodsounds;346658 Wrote: > Ok to lecture someone if you think you've come upon a pigeon, but better > call "off topic" when the pigeon turns out to know more and politely > implies that what one has said may not be correct.
Hey, be nice to Pat, I like him, and he's more "correct" than you think... there's so many "rights" and so little "wrongs" with networking depending on your point of view ;-) Wireless vs wired link is the topic so I guess we can talk about that but the token-ring topic clearly is OT ;-) I'll shock you: yes, TR is better than Ethernet but it's also dead. Not just because it was more expensive, it also lacked support from the manufacturers and while TR was dreaming of 100Mbps, Ethernet was building Gigabit backbones. But..... ISP's like us were using FDDI which is TR at 100Mbps because it was better so here you go. Back to topic: Let's assume the average SB guy who gets himself a 54g router, unpacks it, changes it's wifi-name and configures WEP encryption for safety. Remember, this guy is no network geek like I am and he's doing what people tell him and following advice from forums like this one. Now, I agree with Pat that he will probably end up getting only 5 Mbps. He might not notice that because it'll probably be enough but Pat is right in this scenario. This thread was about connecting SB wired vs wifi and hopped into SC wired or can it be wifi too. The consensus is that you might end up lucky and get away with it but going with a wired SC is a safer approach. Well, as a network geek I can't live with words like "lucky" and "safer". Networks are digital, black and white and any grey needs to be dealt with. I spent 7 years doing that for my ISP business and I will surely help here in the forums with inside info that can get SB users way better results than that lousy 5 Mbps! Also, I assume we're not really all that bust & broke because many here even have TP's. So following are the things that the average guy described above needs to do to make it better: 1. Look at the wifi router. If it's not supporting "n" (okay, I'll use the official term here: 802.11n) he needs to put it on eBay and get a good "n". But the SB is only g so what's wrong with you Verm??!! Well, the cpu's inside the g's are worth crap and although the n's have crappy cpu's for n, they are much nicer for doing g. Let me know if one doesn't understand this because it's important! My advise: DLink-4500. Yes, it's expensive compared to the $50 one you have now but cheap compared to a Cisco. Also, I can report it's fully compatible with the SB's while some brands/models are not. Check the forums before you buy! 2. Go to your routers settings, find the advanced section and disable support for b (802.11b) i.e. select 802.11g only or 802.11g+n but NO b. "But now my laptop doesn't work anymore!!" Buy a better one. You can also do this step for a g router and it helps the same amount: massively, probably almost doubling throughput. Also, check the related pre-amble setting and make sure it's set at "short". These changes give you more air-time for data instead of trying to cope with backwards compatibility all the way back to 1Mbps routers! 3. previous #2 won't help much as long as WEP or even worse WPA is active. Start by noting all mac addresses in use in your home and enter these into the router as the only allowed stations. Now disable WEP, WPA, ANY encryption. If you do not understand the implications, read my previous posts in this thread but the result will be better compatibility with SB (incl SBC!) and a 2nd big improvement on performance. At this point I am confident that you will be able to have a single SC (that's wired to the router) send redbook flac streams to at least 20 SB's as long as all of them have good wifi-links. One with a bad link can impact all the rest because yes it's a shared medium. If you have connectivity trouble, proceed with 4: 4. Start doing that site-survey (see prev. posts in this thread). A laptop with built-in wifi will probably have it's antenna integrated into the display and it's directional. Try to find a spot at an outer-wall of your house where you can see all SB's. Best is an outer corner! Don't worry if signals are low, find the spot and "aim" the screen to where the SB's are located. If you succeed, try to find a better spot. Now draw a little diagram with this spot and all SB's locations and note the dB levels of every SB so you get an idea of the weak spots. If you can't get all SB's you note them as no-signal. Move the wifi-router to the selected spot, fire it up and see if it will find all SB's. Note the dB levels again or any other indication of strength/quality (lots do % here). See if that roughly matches your earlier findings. At this stage you probably have worse connectivity on average and maybe even lost all connectivity with a SB or two. Don't give up yet! Next you need to buy and install stuff again. You need network cables to the new spot for SC and any other stuff you want wired, plus you need at least one but maybe two panel and/or yagi-type external wifi antenna's. If you have a good router, it will have three detachable antenna's. Maybe you only have two. You want at least one of the standard antenna's to remain so that limits choice. If you have two antenna's, get a 180 degree directional panel-type antenna and make sure you get the right cable or adapter for your router. If you have three antenna's and not so good dB readings for the SB's, get two antenna's with a smaller angle, like 60 degrees. You can also use yagi types now. Get all these goodies, hook 'm up and start pointing! The best location for the router is mounted up the wall just under the ceiling, with it's antenna connectors pointing down. Mine is mounted on the ceiling but I'm on a boat and don't have walls ;-) These antenna's are not expensive so you can play with it. Is the "worst" squeezebox still not good enough? Get a high dB 30 deg. yagi ! If your router shows link-quality in addition to signal level you will be shocked at the difference! Some routers show signal in dB and noise in dB: here the important thing is the difference between the two and the directional antenna's will make you and the SB's happy. There's two more things you can do if you like the results but want even better, or need to have better because it's still not good enough. First is that one standard antenna I wrote you need to keep. If you have trouble with stations that are not within the angles of the directional antenna's, you can upgrade this one too. There choice between better ones that directly mount onto the router just like the standard one (look for more dB's and longer length) or you can use an external omnidirectional. You can go as wild as 15 dB gain here which in itself would be enough for anything inside the house but those are ugly so keep it as conservative as possible. Second trick is for when all fails: the wifi-amp. Good ones will amplify both reception and transmission. Do not go higher than 500mW because that will only hurt the noise-levels. You might even need to reduce your routers transmission-power for best results. (I do not advocate an amp in this setup but it will help if all else fails. Amps are made for out-side antenna's) Use the amp on one directional antenna that reaches out to the troubled spot. 5. Yes, there's a number 5 and it's tweaking. It might help with throughput but doesn't give better signal/noise figures so that should be dealt with at #4. In the advanced settings of your router will be options like very-short-pre-amble or turbo-mode or speedboost or whatever they call all that. They involve techniques like creating even more air-time for data and also packet-bursting which is lovely for audio-streams.... if all your wifi-devices keep working. So you need to enable 1 option, test if everything still works and only then proceed with the next tweak. Also, make sure you have the largest supported packet or more correctly -frame- size. Also, when all streams to the SB's are flowing, check the router's status for cpu-load. If you have enough left you might even test using encryption again and see if the degradation in performance is okay. Try WEP first, I think SB handles it better. I probably missed some points so ask or contribute! cheers, Nick. -- DeVerm ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DeVerm's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=18104 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53018 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
