Router Overloaded?

Hey all, for Christmas, the whole family got back together at my parents house. They have a 20mbps cable connection with a WRT54G or similar (can't remember exact router name. Anyway, the internet seems to have slowed to a grinding halt. Now normaly my parents have a laptop, 2 ipads, 1 printer and 1 phone that connect to the router. Now that The family's back we have a huge # of devices attempting to connect:
5 phones
4 laptops
3 ipads
1 xbox one
1 printer

None of us do more than browse the web or watch a youtube video at the same time, but it's still extremely slow.

Is there anything I can do to the router to increase it's efficiency? Is it overloaded? Is the xbox maybe a culprit? I really have no idea, but it gets to the point where no one uses the router at all and just uses data/tethering through our phones.

Appreciate any ideas!
Aaron

On a good day, you might be able to get 20 Mbps of usable bandwidth out of 802.11g. Split among 13 devices (assuming the printer doesn't have a habit of watching random YouTube videos, and that most of the devices are being continually used), that's less than 2 Mbps (256 KBps) per device.

Depending on hardware version, it has at best a 200 MHz CPU. Assuming WPA2 encryption, that many devices is probably a bit much for it

That should be able to handle the load. Are you sure someone doesn't have downloads running in the background (torrents especially)?

Does power cycling the router have any effect?

cullam3n said:

Does power cycling the router have any effect?

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I've tried cycling the power, and as far as torrents go, I'm the only one in the family that knows what they are. the usage is very low, only 1 person at a time watching a video and that's rare. when a bunch of people left the home everything sped up again. I'll try upgrading the firmware as well.

and as far as 2.5 vs 5ghz is one any better at handling more devices? obvi 5 is faster.

ajrettke said:

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I've tried cycling the power, and as far as torrents go, I'm the only one in the family that knows what they are. the usage is very low, only 1 person at a time watching a video and that's rare. when a bunch of people left the home everything sped up again. I'll try upgrading the firmware as well.

and as far as 2.5 vs 5ghz is one any better at handling more devices? obvi 5 is faster.

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5 Ghz is "faster" because the waves wave for a shorter distance Neither is better at handling more devices. The WRT54G was released when WEP was still "secure". Like I said earlier, I think its CPU is just not capable of dealing with more than a few devices using WPA2.

Something to consider too....what is the connection between your router and modem? There is where your bottleneck could be since most router to modem connections are 10/100.

kyfire said:

Something to consider too....what is the connection between your router and modem? There is where your bottleneck could be since most router to modem connections are 10/100.

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I don't recall there ever being ANY wifi routers that were 10 Mbps only (even 802.11b routers used 100 Mbps switches on both LAN and WAN); on ANY internet connection that isn't the most expensive FTTH line, a 100 Mbps WAN port is not going to be a bottleneck.

its a cat5 cable...fairly certain its 100, but my connection is crawling....I mean when I connect to just the router and click on status or dhcp clients table were talking a 1-2 minute delay and many times it just times out.

Yeah might have to upgrade that WRT54G... they are a bit long in the tooth these days.

Sounds like a router cpu issue. Have you tried accessing the config page during busy times over a cabled connection? If the router cpu is overloaded, then the load time should be similar to the wifi page loads. If not, then it is a wifi bandwidth issue and you could really use a dual band router to get some of those clients to a different radio.

If you reboot the router does it fix it for a while?

WRT54G routers have a software problem with lots of IP connections - they really bog down. People usually run into it with P2P file sharing, but if it had lots of devices connected you could potentially see it as well.

I don't think it was ever addressed by Linksys in the firmware upgrades.

Running DD-WRT solves that particular problem, and makes the WRT54G much more reliable and capable in general. It may or may not help your situation but it would be worth trying before spending $$$ on a new router.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_WRT54G/GL/GS/GX