Hi folks,
I need some help understanding the limits of wi-fi and whether I need to get our shop wired for ethernet as we start using VOIP phones.
We are moving our small shop of three people from two analog phone lines to hosted PBX (it looks like from Intermedia at this poing) to better handle customer service calls. Our office/shop is not wired for Ethernet at all, and right now we have 5 devices on the LAN wi-fi The new VOIP phones would bump it up to 8 or 10 devices (assuming I get 802.11n dongles for the phones.
Incidentally, our wireless router Netgear WNR2000v2 went down yesterday (which I will post about seperately!). Until then I thought it was behaving beautifully, but now my trust is shaken.
More on our wireless network's performance: the only metrics I have are speedtest.net results. The computers in the office right next to the router performed strongly, 36 Mbps down, which was above our subscription level with Comcast Business Class. In our backroom rate was down to 6 or 7.
We don't have any intense internet up or down applications right now, just e-mail, at least not for business. We'll stream some video or music sometimes.
So, if I stick with wi-fi, what class of router is worthy of my trust for this small company? Perhaps I should set up a second AP?
If I get the office cabled (which I am kind of psyched to do, a new project for me), what kinds of switches should I look at? I imagine un-managed would be OK, but maybe I do need some QoS rules.
Thanks, folks. This was my first post here.