Intermittent slow router response - old age?

[cytherian]

Actually, you misunderstood me. I was only mentioning the phone with regards to accessibility. My primary use of the router is through a Windows OS based laptop. My side-concern was for my phone being able to access WiFi when set to Wireless N only, which I discovered it can. I have no speed issues with the phone as it just does simple data updates.

"Wireless N can go to 450Mbps but you need the right hardware, you pay for what you get here and nobody gives this stuff away." Did I suggest I was looking for a free way to get faster speeds? No, I'm looking for an economical way to improve my speeds. Some routers are very expensive to pay for all the marketing and fancy casings. I'm on the hunt to find something that works well without being at TOTL prices. However... there are possible limitations. One can be in an environment with too dense local interference that no matter how good the router is, you won't get beyond a certain Mbps threshold. And then there's the matter of range. Aren't there FCC restrictions on how powerful a broadcast signal can be from a WiFi router? So if you're at about 150' vertical, perhaps not even the best commercially available consumer Wireless-N router could provide more than 60Mbps throughput to clients at that distance. I'm just throwing out possibilities, because I don't know what consumer routers are capable of in this regard.

There's also the matter of configuration. If I've set the router to allow up to 300Mbps speeds and a close proximity computer is streaming HD video, I imagine that a computer on the periphery of the broadcast signal is going to suffer when trying to access the Internet. But what if the max Tx rate is set to 100Mbps? Would that help balance data consumption for several PC's sharing the router signal at varying distances? Perhaps something like this is worthwhile to consider.