Home Wife Woe Update 3 -- Woe no more!

Home WiFi Woe Update 3 -- Woe no more!

I showed off the dual router setup to my wife and she shot me a thoughtful question:

"Really? One more power eating thing?"

Hmm... ok then.  

SingTel to the rescue!

I called up SingTel to see if there's something they could offer.  After hearing my wifi problem with the modem, the customer service officer did a line test - there were some error packets!  

"It does seems like there is a problem with the line or modem.  We will schedule an engineer to do a modem swap."

 New Modem Are Dual Band: Aztech FG7003GRV(AC)-J

With the new router in the same position, I did a quick test on just 5Ghz band:

Aztech vs Dlink 868L

Living Room - 134Mbps vs 139Mbps

Bedroom 1 - 84Mbps vs 112Mbps

Kitchen - 42Mbps vs 58Mbps

Dlink is marginally better but hey, Aztech comes free!

Connection Dropped!

After just two days, complaints mounted.  Moving from room to room, connection dropped.  Sight... another call to SingTel.

This time round, it was a bit more difficult to convince the customer service agent.  Nevertheless, she reluctantly agreed to get an engineer to come and have a look.

Signal Strength vs Download Speed

The SingTel engineer armed with Xirrus Wifi Inspector, me armed with Speedtect.com. 

I told him about the connection drop and he told me to use 2.4Ghz instead.

That's right, there are articles online touting the same thing: if you are far from the router, use 2.4Ghz because the signal travels further.

The SingTel engineer showed me the measurement on Xirrus: 2.4Ghz had twice the strength of 5Ghz.  
I showed him the measurement on speedtest: 5Ghz had 10x the download speed of 2.4Ghz.

5Mbps vs 50Mbps -- which one would you choose?  

He relented and asked me, "so what do you want me to do?"

"Ok, can we try another modem? If the problem persist, I will resort to my dual modem setup."

No two modems are alike!

The second modem fared worse:  it look longer to connect to the internet and the wifi speed immediately started off with just 5Mbps of connection speed before slowly rising to full 100Mbps.

The SingTel engineer went downstairs and brought up another modem.

Third time a charm

This modem was blazing fast: fast to connect to the internet and almost as fast on wifi vs Dlink:

Living Room - 142Mbps vs 139Mbps
Room 1 - 98Mbps vs 112Mbps
Kitchen - 58Mbps vs 58Mbps

As of the time of writing this article, it has been operational for more than five days.  No more complaints.  Case closed.







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