AtomicInternet Archived News

With the same difficulties of running a network cable to my media machine that prompted me to buy my current wireless router, I've again decided to dabble in high speed wireless. This decision was a failure last time, but I've been bombarded with enough marketing double-speak to believe in the MIMO revolution and try again. My Xbox occasionally has trouble getting a fast enough connection to my media machine to stream my recorded TV; the adapter and router just can't communicate fast enough to bring me "The Office" without interruption. Enter the Netgear WPNT834 wireless router. I halved the advertised 240Mbps to 120Mbps, then halved it again to bring it to what is probably the actual consistent output. Did I mention marketing double-speak? This brings wireless close to actual wired ethernet speeds, and not surprisingly they mention this on the site. It's also confirmed in various "independent" reviews of the product so I was convinced enough to jump on it. The advantage of moving from Netgear to Netgear is the transfer of all my port forwards, wireless and dyndns settings is relatively easy, but still time consuming. After 30 minutes of copy/paste action I had the routers swapped and was enjoying a great light show. Unfortunately I won't be able to do a true test of wireless speed until I get the matching "240Mbps" wireless adapter for my media machine, but hopefully I'll get a little boost for now. Back when a power surge forced me to use the USB port on my cable modem, Ron noticed web pages loaded faster from this server, which led me to believe the routers firewall was slowing down packet transfers. Now that I have a much larger and heaver router (which we all knows translates to better) I'm hoping Ron will again compliment my server on it's blazing fast packet management (shh, don't tell him). My CoWorker mentioned that soothing blue translated to faster and better wireless speeds so I thought I'd share this revelation.