Recommended line speed for wi-fi

Permit me to offer my deepest sympathies and condolences.

Cable. Speed is everything. However, it's not the download speed that will cause problems. It's the upload. 22Mbits/sec cable usually has only 1Mbit/sec upload. Exactly one user, running a BitTorrent type file sharing program, will totally saturate your upstream bandwidth. Even if you have plenty of download bandwidth available, things will stop because the ACK's will not be getting back from the clients to the servers. Think about bandwidth management, monitoring, and filtering out file sharing programs.

That's 3 or 4 in the coffee shop, and maybe another 3-4 outside in the parking lot and neighboring houses. Think about hotspot security.

One of my customers is a small tea shop. 42 seats. At any given time, there are at least 5 connections moving traffic and another 10 or connected, but not moving traffic. I just took a look at the ARP table. 28 active connections in the 2 hrs (DHCP expiration time).

Here's traffic from another customer running a small bar, with about

That's on a 1.5Mbit/sec DSL line, which appears to be saturated most days. Note that this is after I blocked all known file sharing protocols. Previously, the upstream bandwidth as running at about half the downstream. Think about making sure you don't exceed the cable company download limit.

Good luck.

Doesn't the cable company traffic shape? It may be a decent 7mbps of DSL is better than a traffic shaped cable. Plus from the people I know with cable, it doesn't seem all that reliable. Lots of modem booting required.

Or are you comparing business grade services?

I am amazed at the number of Asian women I see watching what looks like Asian soap operas on their notebooks at Starbucks or Peets. I assume they are streaming it, but I never bothered to ask. If you ever messed with FTA, it looks like that kind of programming.

Nope. The business router doesn't even give you access to the config pages. Traffic shaping includes limits and quotas for individual users. None of the ISP's do that. You have to do that yourself in the router:

Comcast doesn't do prioritization for their own business VoIP traffic, because they don't need to do it. They have a completely separate RF channel for the business VoIP traffic, so none of the other data or video traffic will interfere. I'm not sure if the home VoIP routers work the same way, but I suspect they do as the audio is quite good.

Maybe, but it really depends on how it's setup and configured. There are other oddities with cable that seem to cause problems. I have a neighbor who went cheap and got Comcast 1Mbit/sec cable service and two phone lines on an Arris modem. It's amazing to watch how the data arrives. Instead of slowly dribbling in at 1Mbit/sec, as one would get with 1.5Mbit/sec DSL, it comes in bursts. The peak rate is probably 20Mbits/sec, but there are huge gaps between bursts. Click on a web page, and nothing happens for about 3 seconds, then the whole page paints at once. It's not horrible, but it does take some mental adjustments.

The Comcast VoIP part is fine with no perceptible jitter or garble. That's because it's on a separate RF channel and the regular cable data doesn't interfere. However, when I tried to use Skype or my SIP phone on the 1MBit/sec cable side, the MOS score was horrible, and there were constant dropouts.

Ahem. I have about 5 customers with Comcast business telephone service and at least 5 more (too lazy to count) with home "Triple Play" VoIP service. The business service comes with a UPS and never seems to require a reboot or power cycle. The Arris modems used in the home service can be made to hang by a power glitch, but are generally more stable than my DD-WRT installations. The only surprise was a phone call from one of the home users last weekend. No matter what he did, he couldn't connect. I finally determined that Comcast had swapped routers on him, and copied over a stale ARP table. All he had to do was unplug the cable modem for about 15 minutes, let the ARP table entry expire, and it worked.

I won't say anything nice about some of the local Comcast cable plant, equipment, backup systems, and overloading. However, that's variable and depends heavily on local policies and equipment. If you live in the trees, like I do, things invariably fall on the cable.

Incidentally, that was fixed the day after I reported it.

Yep. A Coffee Shop is a business last time I checked. Comcast will not install home service in a business address.

I've done FTA (free to air) and SCPC (single channel per carrier) audio satellite, as well as the usual DBS (digital broadcast satellite) stuff. What bugs me about some coffee shop systems is that I see high levels of traffic, but nobody seems to be doing anything with the laptops. Sometimes some email or social network pages, but not much else. Locally, lots of people filling out online forms and applications. I've never seen anyone watching a movie. I should check the traffic mix, but since nobody is complaining, I won't bother.

I only know one person with business grade DSL, none with cable, so my only experience is with Comcast consumer stuff. Good when it works, but lots of luck if you have problems.

I've had cable Internet since 1997: 1997-2001 was on Time Warner Roadrunner, and 2001-present is on Comcast. I had a Roadrunner problem in about 1999. I called and they fixed it the same day. With Comcast, I had a problem in 2005. I called and they fixed it the same day.

All in all, I can't complain. Problems are rare, fixes are fast, but it probably depends on the area where you live, how old the cable plant is, the technicians they assign, etc.