Router connectivity problems

Cumbrian_Male

Since my daughter came back from Uni we are having issues. Just wondered if it's the number of connections or the amount of data? The issues have been IP address conflicts, devices being connected to the router but not connected to the internet and numerous times nothing connecting to the internet requiring router rebooting.

Using a Netgear DG834GT we have the following connected.

Wired

Sky+HD box
Smart TV
Smart Blu Ray
1TB HDD

Wireless

4x Smartphone
3x Laptops
2x Tablets
1x PS3
2x Xbox360
2X Wii/U

We use around 200-300Gb a month but this peaks at 500Gb at peak times. We have Netflix, Lovefilm and On demand streaming regularly and kids play MMO games too.

Do we need a better router to handle the connections or is it just the amount of data? Not sure if it's relevant but use a US proxy for Netflix to get greater selection.

GunJack

Hmmm...the GT should be able to handle the number of connections, but the data flow is going to be a bit erratic with a larger number of devices actually using the connection simultaneously. Have you tried only a couple of devices active at once? Is it any better/worse? The IP conflicts can always be an issue unless some/all devices are allocated static IPs on your network - I occasionally have 4-5 things connected and can get that happen(too busy sorting out other people's problems to get round to static IP-ing everything in this house )

Cumbrian_Male

Yes turning off a few devices usually helps.

GunJack

Cumbrian_Male wrote: »

Yes turning off a few devices usually helps.

thought as much !! kids and their stupidly-large data requirements - although, if more than one device is streaming films at a time this'll probably do it too

Figment

IP address conflicts are often (but not always) caused by using a mix of static (fixed) and dynamic (DHCP) addresses. This can usually be resolved by limiting the DHCP addresses to a block of addresses at one end of the IP range, and then ensuring the static IPs are taken from the other end of the range.

For example, if your router's IP is 192.168.0.1 and subnet is 255.255.255.0 then your device IP range will be 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.254. By setting the DHCP range (in the router's admin pages) to start at 192.168.0.102 gives you a range of 100 available IP addresses (192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.101) to use as static addresses and 153 to be automatically allocated by DHCP.