Do I need to buy a new router?

[alvisno15]

I'll be getting internet speeds of 10 mbps next week, and I noticed my routers "mode" says up to 54 mbps. What exactly does that mean? I also wanted a router that has a signal going in one direction since my Netgear is at the opposite side of the house. Thanks for any help

 

[Celegorm]

First what do you mean by signal that goes in one direction? Because they are radio waves the signal will bounce around and go everywhere. However you can get routers with external antennas that you can point to help direct things, but it will always spread out.

When it comes to networks there are two kinds of speeds - internal and external. External is this case would be your internet. The 10 Mbps is the max theoretical download speed of of things coming into your network. This is theoretical because you'll never get the max speed in practice. THe servers your download from can only upload so fast and there is more traffic on your ISP's lines than just you.

Where this part gets confusing is when you add the internal part of the network. In your case, your wireless router's internal max speed is 54 Mbps - this means that file transfers and data sharing between computers that are all on your network will have a max speed of 54Mbps.

 

[setishock]

To make it simple.
54mbps is the radio link to and from the router and your computer. In a perfect world you might hit that. Most likely not.
100mbps is the hard wire connection to and from the router and your computer. Some things can affect that speed also.
Those 2 figures are top speed ratings. If you scope out your connection info in your operating system you'll see it shows top rated speed, not what you're actually running at.
How fast the WAN port goes is up to how fast the connection goes. And even there it's a crap shoot. There's a lot of variables that affect the actual speed. Like signal compression.
You pay for the bandwidth but most likely don't get the full amount. I'm on 18 down and 2 up. I get 17.26 down and 1.47 up.
As for directional, as in aiming the signal, TP-Link makes all kinds of antennas for reasonable prices. But the drawback to aiming is anything in the path of that aimed signal past you is going to get the signal also. If you go that aiming route, put the directional antenna on the computer and aim it at the router.
If you can hardwire in, you'll go a lot faster than you do over the wireless. You might even want to look in to getting hardwire over AC lines as an alternative to running a cable.

---------- Post added at 11:18 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:14 PM ----------

Also microwaves and some cordless phone can toss up interference to 2.4ghz signals. And if they're in the path between you and the router it can block the signal while they're in use.