I’ve been spending more time back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After being in Lincoln, served with Internet by Verizon FiOS, the most painful thing is using Internet from a Comcast cable modem. Maybe it is the slow Comcast name servers, but there is a painful 1-second lag prior to visiting Web sites. Nobody at Comcast seems to have any idea what products they offer here in Cambridge. The Web site says the standard Internet speeds are 20/4 Mbps, 6/1 Mbps, and 50/10 Mbps (in that order and with the 6 Mbps service priced higher than the 20 Mbps service; this is with me signed in so that it knows the location). The customer service agents talk about a totally different range of speeds being available, e.g., 12/2 and 16/3. The discrepancy may be due to some marketing fraud by Comcast where they talk about “PowerBoost” for the first 10 MB of upload (e.g., the first out of 100 digital photos being uploaded). The “chat analysts” have no explanation for why their numbers are different from the advertised numbers.
The technician who showed up to install the service was well informed and efficient. He took one look at my Cisco/Linksys router, a 3-month-old E1200 that has to be rebooted every few days despite firmware upgrades, and said “You should throw out anything from Cisco/Linksys. They never work. Netgear is what you want.”
So let me take this opportunity to thank Verizon for, thus far, four years of high quality service. Another plus for Verizon is that they seem to be able to state what it is that they are selling!
[While Obama and Romney never tire of talking about how the U.S. is the world’s greatest country in every possible way, it seems that 11 other countries have pulled ahead of us in average Internet speed. This article shows that South Korea is the fastest at 16 Mbps, about 2.5X what we’ve got here (6.7 Mbps).]
just test your speed using speedtest dot net
AnandTech says Airport Extreme is the best wireless router.
You means to say US subsidized the broadband rollout in the 90s
and all the companies pocketed that increase in telephone rates.
Now they have monopoly and zero incentive to build the network.
Verizon has stop expanding FIOS and is going full speed on LTE
which is even more expensive.
Comcast is simply protecting its cable franchise and has no use
for Internet. Comcast speed depends of how many neighbors
are on the node which slows down whatever they are promising.
I know how much you love Apple products, but I got a significant faster response at my parents’ place in NYC when I replaced their Netgear with an Apple Airport Extreme. Yes, it was hundreds of dollars instead of the $35 Netgear, but I think in this case it meant that there were a few more chips.
Also, try pointing the DNS to 8.8.8.8 as an experiment. That initial delay could be DNS lookup and Google is, uh, sort of near the edge of that stuff.
Yeah, my Netgear only has to be rebooted once per day, not once every three days.
Why on earth does *any* router ever need to be rebooted, much less most of them?
What makes routers so different than other linux computers?
Try 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 (google dns) or the equivalent opendns 208.67.222.222/208.67.220.220 name servers to get around ISP DNS. ISP DNS is a crapshoot.
Arbitrage: My (shy) friend who was an early Google hero suggested https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using
I’ll also recommend setting your DNS at the access point to Google’s servers. The funny thing is, even the Comcast technicians have recommended that to me.
As a bonus, you don’t get Comcast advertisements based on miss-typed URLs. Just a standard 404.
And I’ve had no problems with either Netgear or Linksys hardware. Of course, I replace the firmware with DD-WRT firmware for a more trusted/secured platform. As a bonus, DD-WRT allows seeing your daily/monthly data usage. This can be handy with soft/hard bandwidth caps…
One more thing on routers…I have a $18 Rosewill from Newegg that I flashed to dd-wrt and it is rock stable. The coverage is great for my small apt in NYC. Ok, I remember now. The router had over heating problems – which is why they all lockup and need power cycling. Based on newegg reviewers recs, I opened up the router and stuck a heatsink on it. Never had it lockup again 😉
Now if you want better coverage I recommend the following:
1. Get an Ubiquiti router. They have a ton of products aimed at the Wireless ISP market but if you read their reviews on AMZN, they get raves. Their Airrouter is $50~. I did some comprehensive research on routers to cover a small campus (10 acres) and Ubiquiti’s products came waaaay ahead of anything else.
2. If you want dd-wrt then invest around $100-$200 in these dd-wrt recs Routers. Of these the Netgear and ASUS are highly recommended.
So summary a) good router b) dd-wrt c) heat sink
enjoy!
🙂
I’ve had a great experience with D-Link network gear. I’m running a router and wireless bridge. Both pairs of Linksys, then Buffalo products were constant headaches–having to be rebooted weekly and sometimes daily at worst. DD-WRT was no help. The D-Link pair has worked flawlessly since installation with one reboot in nine months.
D-Link gear doesn’t have the sexiest and latest marketing jive, but the stuff “just works.” It’s refreshing to see a company that doesn’t replace their entire product lineup on a bi-yearly basis, and produce 6 flawed firmware revisions in the process. Because of their slow(er) product release cycle, apparent emphasis on reliability over bleeding edge speed, I think D-Link products true value gets overshadowed by the majority of network gear reviewers, who constantly miss the mark on what’s important: does it work well over time.
You were lucky to have FiOS. Apparently Verizon has given up on it. Even in Silicon Valley, (I live between Stanford and Sand Hill Road) it’s not available.
Oh well, at least Comcast here has proven very reliable. I use cheap SMC Barricade routers. Other than failing completely every 3-4 years, they’re not much trouble.
http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm
Google’s DNS might be better, but then again, it might not. Measure it.
Last time I used google’s DNSs I got ads when going to non-existant addresses. Unlike Comcast’s DNS, which for me (in California) worked fine.
Comcast has four levels, all independent and with different promotions/prices: the internet, the phone line, the offers on the mail, and the local guys (local shop, installation techs). The internet is usually the worst place. They must employ the the cheapest labour here. The people on the phone are extremely aggressive and openly lie to you (to make a quick sale, and transfer you quickly once that’s done). The local people are usually competent. They know the promotions and prices, which are always different from the online/phone/mail offers.
Really doubt the DNS problems have to do with your router.
Another vote for Google DNS. I have Comcast in Boston, and used to have total DNS dropouts for minutes at a time. Finally switched over to the Google servers and nary a nameserver issue since.
Does internet connectivity entirely drop out for about 10-30 minutes most evenings around 2 AM? Yep. But can’t blame that one on Google.