help! advice needed!

[agoody117]

hello all.

I am in college and will be moving into a house off campus next year. The wireless internet in the house was down right awful last year. Many times the internet did not work or was beyond slow (cut out or take 5 mins to load a screen). Previously the wireless was supported by one router put in a central location. There were 8 people living in the house in 7 rooms all using that one router.

Next year there will be 11-12 people living in 8 rooms next year in the same house.

My question is what would be the best thing to do to improve our internet so that we are all able to enjoy high speed internet for our computers and online gaming?

I am pretty inept about most tech lingo so please try and keep it as simple or try to explain things.

any and all help would be much appreciated. thanks!

ps. also if you know how much such a improvement would cost please add that in.

[johnwill]

First off, we'd have to know a LOT more about what kind of ISP connection you have there. If the connection is slow, or there are people using P2P or other volume downloads, you're pretty much out of luck I would imagine.

If you have a decent ISP connection, you can look into a higher quality router with advanced QoS capability to limit the bandwidth hogs from sucking up all the bandwidth.

If possible, I'd also consider wired connections, which will also help a great deal. A dozen connections to a single wireless access point will be an exercise in patience, and is probably a key factor in the poor performance!