Thinking of moving to 5GHz, any recommendations?

[fleshconsumed]

I have a HTPC setup that streams movies over draft N wireless, 2.4GHz band. Sadly my dLink 655 bit the dust a month or two ago (needs rebooting daily). I replaced it with spare airlink draft N router which works great, except that every once in a while I get connection issues. The symptoms are sound and video freezing, usually happens once every hour or two. What I usually do is pause the playback, wait 5-15 seconds and then unpause the movie and everything works fine again. It is however kind of annoying, especially if I have someone else over, so I'm looking into how I can fix it.

One way would be to simply get another dlink 655 router. However I get two strong 2.4GHz signals from my neighbors and a bunch of smaller ones already, so I'm already squeezed for wavelengths I can use, plus we are still using a couple of G clients on 2.4GHz band that might slow down things even more. Another way would be to get a 5GHz router/client.

I'm leaning towards the latter, but I need some recommendations on what router/client card to buy. I'm looking for a single band/single radio 5GHz router and a client. So far I'm looking at dlink 1522 and dlink 2553. Any others? I'm also having major trouble finding 5GHz client cards. So far they are all either old pci (not pci-e) or USB based. Does it make sense to buy pci card with external antenna over USB one? Can anyone recommend a good combination of router/client? Any input would be welcome.

 

[superccs]

Run a CAT5 cable to the HTPC and you won't have to worry about local radio noise.

I live in an apartment and wish there weren't so many routers nearby.

You should be able to get 100' of cable for cheap, maybe even run it through the rafters and get creative.

 

[Modelworks]

Can you determine what direction the outside 2.4 signals are coming from ?
If you can then you can replace the antenna on the router with a directional antenna pointing towards the receiving pc. This may only work if the outside signals are not the same direction as the receiving pc. In effect you are concentrating your routers transmit power over a more narrow space that should overwhelm anything external.

They really should stop shipping routers with omnidirectional antennas for the default . instead mark on the box what type of antenna it is and the recommended environment. Selling a bunch of omnidirectional routers to people in apartments is a bad idea. If they were all using directional antennas then the problem would be much less of a problem.

 

[sxr7171]

For HTPC I highly recommend going wired if you can. I am using a DIR-655 myself and also with a Netgear WNHDE111. You can use 2 of the Netgears and create a 5GHz Wireless N Bridge or just use one as an AP. It works surprisingly well.

I was using the Netgear Bridge setup for HTPC uses, but really it has only 100Mbps ports and while I communicated with the engineer who designed it and he swears that the wireless link cannot exceed that speed I found that I was getting my transfers limited at 100Mbps thanks to that 100Mbps port. But if you must go with 5Ghz N one those Netgears at roughly $45 can't be beat.

I now keep a nice Cisco 16 port gigabit switch for all my networking. Only my laptops use wireless.

EDIT: They say 5GHz needs "line of sight" well that's an exaggeration of sorts, but I wouldn't place the AP in an attic or basement either. It needs to be relatively unobstructed to work well.

 

[boomhower]

I use a couple of these for my 360/PS3/WD TV Live and love them. They work great for streaming high def. I stream 1080P with 10MB bit rates. I use an old Linksys dual band router but there are much better options out there but I haven't kept up on them. I like my router and will run it until it dies. If I had to pick it would be the Netgear WNDR3700, yeah I like Netgear.

 

[gsaldivar]

Wired network for HTPC at all costs.