Wireless N & G together and new router

Hi guys,

Had a quick scour through the forums but couldn't find a response which exactly fitted my issue. Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere.

Setup:
- PS3 connected wth Wireless G
- Readynas NAS DUO / PCH Streamer / Blu Ray - all hard cabled
- Squeebox Boom (Wireles G)
- 2 Wireless G laptops
- 3 wireless N laptops
- DG834G v3 modem router
- BE Unlimited (downspeed about 13.5mbps and upspeed 1.3mbps)

Thinking of upgrading to a Wireless N modem router but wary of comments across the forums of speed degradation when mixing G & N clients on an N wireless network.

Question
1) Can I make the DG834G just a Wireless Access Point to serve the G-only clients?
2) Can I connect the DG834G to a new wireless N modem router which would serve the G-clients
3) Given thay my NAS would benefit from a Gigabit switch, and I'm on BE Unlimited, is there a model router which would be ideally suited to these, if 1 and 2 above are both possible?

Thanks for any help

You have a minor typo in Point 2. You mean wireless N.

Yes, you could use one as the modem and access point 1, and connect the other via ethernet to it as access point 2. Disable DHCP in the secondary one that isn't connected direct to the phone.

In reply to a post by HomeWorker:

Thinking of upgrading to a Wireless N modem router but wary of comments across the forums of speed degradation when mixing G & N clients on an N wireless network.

Unless you have a lot of free channels around you, having both G and N as separate networks (on different channels) will be quite hard to do!! To do N fully you need 2 bonded channels, and finding two channels in the 2.4ghz space in most towns is annoyingly tricky.

If you have 5ghz N equipment then you will have more channels to try but not all N kit is 5ghz.

A link to InSSIDer which is brilliant on Windows for analysing the competing local wireless router channels in use.

Thanks guys for the info. I've downloaded inSSIDer as you suggested

I see 6 wireless stations reported.
Mine is on channel 3, there are three wireless N stations on channel 6 (two of which have the same MAC address and the other is BT Openzone, so I suspect these are all the same device??), one G station on channel 11 and one on channel 1.

Is this level of local traffic likely to be problem with my proposed solution above?
And sorry to sound like a complete numpty, but what is the likely impact going to be if I do press ahead with the proposed solution?

Your advice is much appreciated - cheers

Edited by HomeWorker (Thu 06-Jan-11 19:36:15)

I don't think you'll have much of a problem. Assuming you want it in your home, neighbours' signals will be attenuated greatly by distance and brick walls. Using innssider will allow you to choose the best channels.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

I don't think you'll have much of a problem. Assuming you want it in your home, neighbours' signals will be attenuated greatly by distance and brick walls. Using innssider will allow you to choose the best channels.

Thanks BatBoy. I definitely want it in my home, although occasionally in the garden with a cold beer, but that's limited to about 3 days a year when the weather is warm enough!

Another wireless station just appeared on inSSIDer, G station on channel 5. This program is good!!! I assume that this additional station merely reduces the choices of wireless channels I can choose and doesn't have a dramatic effect upon your response?

So, bearing in mind I'm on Be Unlimited, is there a specific modem router I should be looking at (preferably Netgear, but been looking at the Billion 7800N but this seems pricey. I seem to recall reading somewhere that Be prefers a particular chipset but I'm not sure which routers contain which chipsets??

cheers

As BatBoy says. I can see about 14 in my area.

If you look at the signal strength graph you can see the degree of overlap with yours. On "g" which is all I know they recommend three to four channel separation if you can get it. The signal strength in the graph helps you decide, as a close channel number but very weak could be less problem than a strong signal one further away in number.

Don't forget the top channel, is it 13 or 14? Very few use that.

There's the DGN2000 and 2200 but I don't know the difference, and I doubt if they have the gigabit switch .

Great - thanks for the info though.