Switched internet providers from Earthlink/DSL to ATT/Uverse
I really really liked Earthlink/DSL. I didn't want to say good bye. They had provided my little family with our DSL for over 10yrs. Reliably. Afford-ably.
The trouble was, speedtest.net showed our DSL service was 1.3Mbit down/0.3Mbit up.
For 10yrs, when internet usage at my house was just my wife and I, so just two internet users, surfing the net, telecommuting (which is mostly email), and Netflix (one stream). For it, Earthlink/DSL did great.
But, now my little family is a family of five internet users. Three wi-fi laptops, Netflix, iPhones, and two Kindles.
So, as soon as my kids got home from school, my telecommute would bog down, as the available bandwidth just wasn't enough. We tried to go to the next level of DSL speed/bandwidth higher, but seems my house is too far away from the closest phone hub, so there was no noticeable increase.
So, the only next thing we could do was see what other providers were out there. One was ATT/Uverse.
They installed the 'gateway' today. Wife reported speedtest.net shows about 18Mbit down/1Mbit up.
HARDENING THE DEFAULT ATT/UVERSE WI-FI SETTINGS.
Used a wired connection to the ATT/Uverse gateway, logged into the configuration via
http://192.168.1.254 (for my hardware, the default passphase to log into the gateway is the 'device access code.')
Went to the LAN settings tab. Wireless settings section.
Changed the default SSID from 2wire### to a longer custom SSID.
Changed the security settings to WPA2 AES PSK
Changed the WPA2 AES passphrase from the weak factory-provided default to a 60 digit randomized password that uses upper and lower case letters, punctuation, and numbers.
Connected using the new hardened wi-fi settings on my debian linux laptop and work laptop, and verified all is well.
EDIT 19:12pm
No one else is home, just ran speedtest.net, results were (using WPA2 AES PSK, strong passphrase, wi-fi connection to the gateway): 22Mbit down/1.4Mbit up.
EDIT 2014-11-10
Now that my Oldest and Middle child constantly stream content when they are home, am a little worried about them blowing our monthly data limit from ATT, do dropped the max Mbit/second setting to 48Mbit/second (thankfully they only connect via wireless, so throttling the max bitrate will be a easy way to 'control it.')
robert@debian:~$ /sbin/iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"[redacted]"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: [redacted]
Bit Rate=48 Mb/s Tx-Power=30 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=55/70 Signal level=-55 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:26 Missed beacon:0
eth0 no wireless extensions.
2014-11-29
Lowered the wi-fi bitrate one more setting lower. Now is 36 Mbit/sec.
robert@debian:~$ /sbin/iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"[redacted]"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: [redacted]
Bit Rate=36 Mb/s Tx-Power=30 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=47/70 Signal level=-63 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:71 Missed beacon:0
eth0 no wireless extensions.
2015-08-21
Lowered the wi-fi bitrate one more setting lower. Now is 24Mb/sec
robert@debian:/tmp$ /sbin/iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"[redacted]"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 74:9D:DC:31:58:89
Bit Rate=24 Mb/s Tx-Power=30 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=58/70 Signal level=-52 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:103 Missed beacon:0
eth0 no wireless extensions.