That traffic cop isn't even breaking a sweat. That's easy if you have four cars driving through the intersection at a reasonable 30 miles per hour-in this analogy that would be, like, a desktop PC running a game, a Roku streaming 1080p Netflix, a laptop just browsing and a smartphone playing Instagram stories. Think of it this way: Your router is basically like a traffic cop in the middle of an intersection that splits off to a thousand different roads, and it has to know instantly what traffic should go where, and it has to do that job without ever slowing down or getting confused, forever. I built a PC that can do a better job of directing traffic around my network, and turned my old wi-fi router into an access point-basically taking away all of its responsibilities except passing along information to wireless devices. But the wi-fi is actually extra functionality. They're essentially low-power computers built to do just one thing-control network traffic-and they have antennas that beam your data over the 2.4GHz and 5GHz spectrum. When we talk about routers, we're pretty much always talking about wi-fi routers. What does building your own router mean, exactly? I'd already bought a bunch of new plants and re-caulked my kitchen sink, so here we are.Īlso, because of this exact instinct, I'd already built a mini-ITX PC I didn't need, and it was perfect for this job. Something had to change.Īlso, I've been stuck at home for four months, and every time I start to go stir crazy I overreact to the first thing that frustrates me by fixing it in the most elaborate way possible. I started running speedtests every day, and despite spending hours messing with my $250 Netgear R8000 router (opens in new tab) and modem, I wasn't getting near gigabit speeds. Worse, for some reason downloading a game, even at 100-200 mbps, would often tank the entire home network. Even over Ethernet, downloading games from Steam didn't go nearly as fast as I knew Steam's servers could handle. A few months ago I upgraded to to a gigabit fiber connection, and initially seemed to be getting close to true gigabit speeds.
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