Tuesday, December 30, 2014

AT&T Uverse and My Home Network

At my house, we recently switched away from Comcast for Internet and Phone.  For television, we had Dish Network.

I'm pretty impressed with the Uverse experience.  Internet is fast enough with 18 Mbps plan.  I've seen maximums in the 25 Mbps range as well too.  TV is clear and HD picture is better than Dish Network.  I've heard that Dish has the worst HD quality of the major providers.  In one month of usage, I haven't experienced any bad network connectivity with the TV signal.    Overall, though I'm very happy over my Comcast/Dish Network configuration.

I did a diagram of the configuration using Gliffy.


The diagram shows that I have decent separation between the TV network boxes and the Data/Computer network.  I doubt it really matters, but it seems logical to separate the two.  The N600 is necessary because I have an external storage drive that the NVG589 does not support.  Further, the GS108 switch and the N600 are on separate floors in the house.  I tried to connect the N600 to the GS108 switch, but the computer was not getting any internet responses.  I suspect that is because the TV was taking most of the traffic and somehow leaving the router out of the picture.

I've recently added another router to the picture to help with wireless range in the house.  My second floor had an RJ-45 jack in the third bedroom that goes into the basement.  I connected that to the N600 and then configured the N300 to use the same wireless details (on a different channel) as the N600.  Voila! Instant range extension!  I was looking at the 'wireless repeater' functionality, but since I had the RJ-45 jack this was a no-brainer to use.

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