OT: WiFi routers

[Bill]

My internet router seems to have to be reset more and more often in the last few months, so I'm vaguely thinking of investing in a more advanced model. This will at least prove whether it is the BT end of things, or my ageing equipment.

I have a whole bunch of laptops, tablets and other junk here, and feel a need to understand a bit more about the wifi part of the operation. I have googled, but suspect I have once again asked the wrong question.

My present Netgear N150 router says it's "b/g with some n features".

One W7 laptop says its wifi speed is set to 120Mbps, but it fluctuates up to 150. Another slightly older machine says it is at 65Mbps. Here, the question is whether bringing up a slower laptop will set the router to a slower speed. I assume it will, but does this happen on the fly, at startup time or when?

Question 2 is about dual band routers. Some seem to be one band at a time, others both bands together. If I were to have an n laptop, could it use the 5Ghz band channel while a g laptop used the other channel, or would everything slow down to the lower speed and all go for the HCF (ie slow)?

I'd be grateful for any guidance or any pointer to a good layman's guide to how these things work in the real world.

[polygonum]

Some routers can handle traffic on both bands without any obvious difficulty. Others do seem to have problems - like "all at 5GHz or none at 5GHz". Our own one is an Apple Airport - quite long in the tooth now, but, when new, was one of the first to support both bands at the same time. Some vague memory of a firmware update improving that in the early days.

[Bill]

Well, I've hopefully invested wisely in a router that will soon be winging its way via the ebay emporium in the cloud. It will be interesting to see what it does.

I've been trying to practice running iperf on 4 machines. The server is on the b/g/n Win7 machine and one laptop is a b/g/DraftN running Win8, a similar machine on Win7, the third just b/g on a laptop running Linux Mint. All are connected wirelessly, so each has 2 wireless hops to the server.

The Draft-N machine on its own averages 35Mb/s. Iperf simultaneously on a second roughly halves this to about 16 per machine, but very variable. The Mint machine on its own achieves about 16Mb/s Mint + a Draft-N machine halves the speed on both machines, so N = 16 and b/g becomes about 8

The Mint machine can dual boot with unregistered Win7, which runs at the same speeds as Mint, so the OS is irrelevant.

What is interesting is that when more than one machine is testing, everything becomes much more variable and performance can drop to very poor.

Apologies for boring everyone with this.

[Chris]

I found my old Netgear router started hanging after I acquired a Windows

7 desktop. Seems it was associated with IPV6 which I think is operational by default and the Netgear didn't like it. MS doesn't recommend disabling it, but as all my other stuff used IPV4 I tried disabling v6 on the W7 machine and things worked OK C