G3/G4 and WIFI access point in one box ?

[RobbieW]

...Secondly, in a busy area you probably have channel bandwidth of 20 and the thing might be set to that, so go into the router settings and choose 40 (to double your speed, compared with 20, if no neighbour interference). On super-new stuff there is now 80, as well as 20 and 40

4. Just to be clear, if you are on 20 not 40 and have one channel not 3, you have max 1/6th of the claimed rating!

So in summary put the laptop near the router so that the short range of 5Ghzdoesn't hurt you, then select the 5Ghz band via separate SSID for the 5 (to distinguish from the 2.4) and set the channel bandwidth to 40 (or at least 20/40 auto) and you should easily stream video (assuming the remote storage device that the video is stored on is itself fast enough, but you knew that!)

Please dont set your bandwidth over 20 in busy places. The way the devices increase the throughput is to use more channels; with the bandwidth set to 20 you are effectively using 3 channels because the separation isnt that good, set it to 40 and you're now using 6 consecutive channels. There is some basis in the view that only channels 1, 6 & 11 should be used because the software in routers is better at dealing with competition on the same channel than it is dealing with overlap from other channels. Also turn the transmit power right down on your router and minimise the interference its likely to cause, its doesnt need to be high as most of us dont have boats that big nor with concrete walls!

 

[RobbieW]

I've been trying to get this working with a combination of a TP-Link 3G router, Three 3G USB modem and a Netgear WiFi to LAN adaptor. I believe it can be made to work, but getting all the various components configured to work together is a real pain. Both the 3G network and the marina WiFi network operate NAT and try to come up on the same 192.168 subnet which makes configuration difficult. Also, the marina WiFi operates on a captive portal making it difficult for the router to recognise that it is necessary to fall back to the 3G modem - I seldom fail to get a WiFi connection - far more often fail to get one that does anything useful!

The configuration I have uses 192.168.20.x as the static boat network. All personal devices attaching get DHCP addresses in that subnet.

The devices providing WiFi or mobile connections use the 192.168.10.x subnet and give the main router a DHCP address when they connect to it. It may be that you need to figure out how to provide different subnet addresses to the virtual LANs that your Netgear device is bridging together.

I believe that separation is necessary to maintain the independence of the two networks.

 

[jfm]

Please dont set your bandwidth over 20 in busy places. The way the devices increase the throughput is to use more channels; with the bandwidth set to 20 you are effectively using 3 channels because the separation isnt that good, set it to 40 and you're now using 6 consecutive channels. There is some basis in the view that only channels 1, 6 & 11 should be used because the software in routers is better at dealing with competition on the same channel than it is dealing with overlap from other channels. Also turn the transmit power right down on your router and minimise the interference its likely to cause, its doesnt need to be high as most of us dont have boats that big nor with concrete walls!

Yup. My thinking was that many people have routers set to 20 because these days we use them in apartment blocks or busy urban places where the neighbour interference is massive. On a boat however you might be in an anchorage with a handful only of other boats that have wifi hence almost zero neighbour bandwidth competition. I thought it is then worthwhile going into settings and selecting 40. Are you saying that even in zero competition zones the use of 6 channels rather than 3 might hurt due to overlap?

Separately, if MapisM has a 5Ghz radio in his router he will likely have zero neighbour interference in a boat, because of the lack of installed 5Ghz routers plus its much lower range than 2.4. I thought therefore he wants max bandwidth and 5Ghz settings I think to cure his video stream problem. But are you saying the overlap from using 6 channels creates more bad data and resends, and he'd be better using 3 channels and 20 b/width?

BTW I am not arguing with you - I'm asking questions! My knowledge of all this is very limited and I'll defer to you and lots of other people on anything technical . It is important however to remember that boats (especially MapisM's judging from the videos he puts up on here ) are often in zero interference places and at 5GHz will almost always see zero competition, which is a complete contrast to say 2.4Khz in a city street or apartment block.

Incidentally MapisM, if you use iPhone 5 remember that does wireless at 5Ghz. I don't know about iPad - I will try it this weekend

EDIT: BTW my router and many routers have a "20/40 auto" setting whereby it decides for itself, but I don't know what criterion it uses to make the selection

 

[RobbieW]

...
EDIT: BTW my router and many routers have a "20/40 auto" setting whereby it decides for itself, but I don't know what criterion it uses to make the selection

If theres no-one else within a couple hundred metres, it doesnt make a lot of difference what setting is used. The owner then needs the discipline to return the router to 20 when they get back home as there they will likely be touching thier neighbours (so to speak ). Its possible the AUTO setting you describe looks at the networks around and decides accordingly.

Using 2.4, MMs problem will be worse if anyone around is using 40 or 80 because that will interfere with his network rather than him interfering with himself . I'm using a tool called inSSIDer3 on the laptop which shows the problems of overlap quite clearly and helps you decide which channel is good for where you are at the time you run it - I switched to channel 1 after looking at that. Transmit power (db) is the other factor as most folk would assume that stronger is better - you (and everyone else) would get better throughput by using the minimum required for the job you want to do - too much power can cause problems with devices close to the router.

You are quite right about the 5Ghz band, there are relatively few people using that today - I know less about that too as I'm using 2.4.

 

[MapisM]

MM I think you are possibly blaming the router unnecessarily...

Sorry, in hindsight I wasn't clear enough. The attempt I made with my router was as follows:
1) USB hard drive connected to one of the USB ports on the router;
2) PC connected to the router with RJ45 cable (with both the notebook and the router ethernet ports rated at 1Gb).

With this setup, I experienced that I could access any file on the USB disk from the notebook with an apparently decent speed, but if I tried to play on the notebook any video files directly from the USB disk, the playback speed was not good enough, with constant lagging, regardless of the player used on the notebook (VLC being my usual player, but I also tried with others, and had the same result).
Based on that attempt, I did not even try to do the same through wireless connection, and I simply assumed that the router access to the USB drive was not fast enough to work as a "proper" server.
TBH, I must also say that both the disk and the router had USB 2.0 ports, hence well below the theoretical 1Gb ethernet speed, but since the same disk was fast enough also for video when connected directly to the notebook USB port, my conclusion was that the router was the bottleneck for video bandwidth requirements.

It might well be that in the meantime some more modern routers, with USB 3.0 ports, connected to a USB 3.0 disk, can handle the job even with a wireless connection....
...if anyone has such setup, I'm all ears!

 

[MapisM]

I'm using a tool called inSSIDer3 on the laptop

+1, very handy bit of software indeed.
Just in case you're interested, there's also the Android app, which works equally well.

 

[jfm]

Ah thanks Mm. I mistake my assumed wifi connection not LAN sorry. I see your point. I'll try it on mine

I'd be interested to know whether the time saved by computers is mostly eaten up by fiddling with them

 

[Hurricane]

I use a router with 4 ports for the fixed stuff and WiFi for on board devices.
The WAN port of the router is connected to a cheap WiFi Router/Access Point set up in Client mode for connection to the marina Wifi
The 4 port router is configured with a secure VPN tunnel to a similar device at my home in Devon.
The whole LAN uses an IP address range 10.0.20.x with the WiFi Router/Access Point set up in Client mode set at an oddball address of 10.64.64.64
The idea is that I can always browse to 10.64.64.64 to set up my marina WiFi access and all my other LAN traffic stays inside the 10.0.20.x range
And that includes all my home devices so I can then use Windows RDP to remotely control my home servers/home media centers etc whilst I'm away.

If I need to connect to the internet through 3G, I simply turn a spare Android phone into a tethered device and connect the boat to it.

Maybe a bit complicated but I've been doing this for several years now and it works.
I'd love to find a good 3G/4G service here in Spain with unlimited data for a good price.
I'm sure it will come though

 

[MapisM]

Ah thanks Mm. I mistake my assumed wifi connection not LAN sorry. I see your point. I'll try it on mine

I'd be interested to know whether the time saved by computers is mostly eaten up by fiddling with them

LOL, you don't want to really know that.
It's a bit like wondering if the time spent actually enjoying boats is worth the time spent fiddling with them...

Thanks in advance for checking if/how the above works with your setup, looking fwd to the result.

 

[RobbieW]

...
TBH, I must also say that both the disk and the router had USB 2.0 ports, hence well below the theoretical 1Gb ethernet speed, but since the same disk was fast enough also for video when connected directly to the notebook USB port, my conclusion was that the router was the bottleneck for video bandwidth requirements.
...

You got me interested in what youre trying to do so tried it myself. In trying to get the share set up I came across this post in the Tomato (the router software I use) forums...

You have to understand that these consumer routers do not have dedicated USB chips on them. These routers use what's called a SOC, which is a "system on a chip"; i.e. the CPU, USB, Wifi, etc. are all in one very small chip on the motherboard and are across a proprietary on-die bus of some sort. The main focus of these chips is cost/convenience, not speed. I've yet to see a single consumer-grade router offer good USB throughput. To make matters worse, these are embedded systems, where debugging/troubleshooting is often very difficult given the limited amount of space/resources for debugging (not to mention most end-users do not know how do this).

As far as "home users getting 70-100MBytes/second with their home NAS" -- yup. You can read my own benchmarks here, which includes the systems/hardware involved, filesystems, Samba tuning, and throughput examples. You need to http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r27618714-, not skim it. In general CIFS/SMB is a crappy protocol with a lot of overhead (meaning FTP performs much better -- I show that in my post), but your situation with your router almost certainly isn't because of that. You'll see that with CIFS/SMB with Samba, I can get about 55MBytes/second between systems, while between the same two systems with FTP I can get 95MBytes/second.

The original is here - http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/slow-nas-usb-performance.60863/ With that insight perhaps streaming video from a USB connection on the router is not the way to go?

 

[admillington]

On the boat I have this G3 modem, wifi network box:

http://www.vololink.com/ez-live/site/index.php/eng/Products/VoloAccess/VoloAccess

inside the box is a sim card, with a rechargeable data account,
so on the boat I have a ethernet / wifi network, connected to the internet through the G3 data connection.

many marina's have a local wifi network, so I would like to have a box or a solution,
that my Blue Angel Wifi network can be connected to the internet either via the G3 data card, OR via the local Wifi network where available

I prefer to alway's work via my local Blue Angel wifi network, because in the network are different units that can communicate via the network, ao:
- me and swmbo's Labtops
- the printer
- a Sonos sound system
- a Blue Angel Ipad, with weather pred. , music, etc...


any idea's ?

jason from C A Clase visited the boat on Friday and sorted out the Yacht Router and now it is fully operational.

Configuration is unit connected to two external antennas, one for shore to boat Wi-Fi and one for cellular and there is an internal antenna for the local Wi-Fi.

From an iPad app, I can control the unit and it is very simple to switch from Wi-Fi to Cellular. As it has an external antenna when I scan for WI-Fi network, not only do I get the marina system but also Btopenzone etc.

all in all, I am very pleased with the setup and it does answer Bart's original requirement.

Andrew

 

[BartW]

jason from C A Clase visited the boat on Friday and sorted out the Yacht Router and now it is fully operational.

Configuration is unit connected to two external antennas, one for shore to boat Wi-Fi and one for cellular and there is an internal antenna for the local Wi-Fi.

From an iPad app, I can control the unit and it is very simple to switch from Wi-Fi to Cellular. As it has an external antenna when I scan for WI-Fi network, not only do I get the marina system but also Btopenzone etc.

all in all, I am very pleased with the setup and it does answer Bart's original requirement.

Andrew

other useable solutions posted above aswell, thank you all for sharing,
but this Yachtrouter is indeed exactly what I was looking for,
factory in Croatia, mmm thats new
they don't have a dealer in Belgium, and we might use the kid for OB-Van broadcast applications,
will contact them directly and tell them that I'll be showing around with their stuff in South Croatia all summer (if all goes accoring to plan)

Andrew do you have the "standard" model ?
for what boat / setup ?
I'll probably have the "mini" model, has more than I need today..

thanks for posting

 

[Deleted User YDKXO]

Slight thread drift here. I don't bother with marina wifi because I've yet to find one in the Med that gives anywhere near an acceptable speed. For the last 2 seasons I've relied on tethering my Iphone 5S to my laptop which works OK in most locations including, of course, many anchorages. I only use the internet for dealing with emails and light internet usage and I don't generally want to transmit large files. I have a Vodafone phone and data package at a reasonable cost which covers Europe.
I'm thinking about buying a Hubba http://www.buzzconnect.co.uk/hubba/ and one of their data plans in the hope of getting increased 3G coverage. Anyone got any experience of these?

 

[MapisM]

With that insight perhaps streaming video from a USB connection on the router is not the way to go?

Yep, pretty much the conclusion I reached even without digging into the technicalities, but thanks for the explanations.
After all, it would be too good to be true, if a router would be as efficient as a proper server in sharing HDs over a local network....
And it's far from being a critical requirement anyway, for onboard usage!

 

[MapisM]

Anyone got any experience of these?

Nope, sorry - never heard of that before, in fact. But it does look promising.
+1 as interested to hear more!

 

[admillington]

other useable solutions posted above aswell, thank you all for sharing,
but this Yachtrouter is indeed exactly what I was looking for,
factory in Croatia, mmm thats new
they don't have a dealer in Belgium, and we might use the kid for OB-Van broadcast applications,
will contact them directly and tell them that I'll be showing around with their stuff in South Croatia all summer (if all goes accoring to plan)

Andrew do you have the "standard" model ?
for what boat / setup ?
I'll probably have the "mini" model, has more than I need today..

thanks for posting

Bart

i have the micro model fitted to a 2012 Fairline Squadron 58.

due to Moodynick setting up the marina Wi-Fi it is super fast and stable.

Andrew

 

[Robg71]

Am impressed with that yachtrouter... Looking at there website now.... Reckon leave the draytek, 3/4g dongle etc etc etc etc at home/office....

Think i will be ordering one of those... Thanks very much chaps, that looks like just the simplest solution, as most previously have been multiple kit same similar to what i was working on at home....

 

[admillington]

Am impressed with that yachtrouter... Looking at there website now.... Reckon leave the draytek, 3/4g dongle etc etc etc etc at home/office....

Think i will be ordering one of those... Thanks very much chaps, that looks like just the simplest solution, as most previously have been multiple kit same similar to what i was working on at home....

Let me know if you do and I will share all the knowledge I have collected such as no special characters in the local Wi-Fi password.

 

[Robg71]

That would be great, so... Yes please....

 

[ExmoorTech_Jim]

We look after the WaveWifi range of products in the UK and Europe, please take a look at http://store.exmoor-tech.co.uk or www.wavewifi.com for details.

We can offer free advice on product selection for any application and are happy to answer any technical questions about Marine Internet connectivity.

For Bart's application - I would suggest looking at the Rogue Pro 4G kit http://store.exmoor-tech.co.uk/products/roguepro-4g-kit

Please feel free to ask any technical questions either via the forums here or via our website direct