Wireless. I'm not fannying around with it any more.

Recently bought a simultaneous dual-band router - very few of them on the market.  The Netgear N600 has excellent reviews - as long as you're on ADSL2 (+) - and is particularly noted for the range over which it manages to sustain performance.  As a replacement for the Billion 7800N and Netgear 5GHz AP it seemed a sensible next step to cure my woes.  Finally got round to setting it up yesterday and then changing the config of the surprisingly large number of wireless doobreys scattered around the house.

Performance is impressive. The 5GHz band won't reach the troublesome area at the back of the house from the attic, but elsewhere the throughput is fantastic. At some point I'll try siting it at the ADSL termination in our bedroom and see if it can reach from there - which will mean, if it can, running a cable to a switch in the attic for the machines up there - but I can cope with that.  The most interesting thing about the current state of affairs is that I've found a location for the repeater which appears to be interference-free (touches wood, kicks black cats out of path etc): Right in the middle of the serving hatch from the kitchen to the kids room.

What's so interesting?  Well, this is less than 15 feet away from the area with all the interference issues, so shouldn't make a massive difference, ceteris paribus.  But the notable thing about this position is that line of site to the wireless router is impeded by a couple of floors only and the repeater is, essentially, in the middle of a wall.  If the interference comes across the house from others in the terrace (or across the side road), it's probably shielded from it by a lot of bricks and mortar. Which is exactly what I suspect is happening.

Sky seem to have tweaked my ADSL recently too 

Which is reflected in the connection speeds the router is syncing at

So I'm currently getting pretty good performance at the router - you'd have to move to fibre to get much of an improvement on this. In most of the house I'll get this over 802.11n as well, on 5GHz or 2.4.

More importantly, the connection seems pretty stable in the problem area at the back of the house - where I'm currently sitting.  I haven't had this setup for more than a day or so, but if it carries on looking like this, I can live with it. Just about.  My aspirations have, frankly been realigned over the last 12 months...

I'm officially retiring this topic.  Until Sky start enforcing MER (MAC Encapsulated Routing), which, it's rumoured, they may well do.  When I switched to Sky, I made it a condition that they provided the DSL login, so I could use my own router - and, at the time, they were very happy to do so:  it was very early in their rollout.  But it appears this is in breach of their terms and conditions and if they enforce MER I'll have to spoof the correct MAC address of the router - possible, although I don't actually know it, since the original router went eBaywards years ago.  More importantly, my router will have to cope with Sky's slightly odd implementation of MER - and there are no signs of any Netgear firmware upgrades in the ether today. Ironically, Billion - makers of the previous router - have issued a beta firmware upgrade for precisely this reason in the last month.

But - today - it's all performing tolerably well. I am cracking open a beer and hoping it stays that way for a while...