# Is this a feasable use case for Tivo Mini?



## VirtualViking (Dec 21, 2014)

Quick & to the point. I'm an IT engineer who knows of but never owned Tivos. In my new house I have FiOS but the place I want my 2 TVs has no Coax or Ethernet run nearby. I'm leasing so I will have to jump through hoops for permission to run cables and likely wait for an "authorized installer" even though I could easily do it myself. A frustrating red tape PIA. So I was thinking...

I already have a Wireless AC2400 router. I could place an AC1300 bridge at the main TV which could be as little as 2' away from the router with a wood floor in between. The 2nd TV would be about 20' away with two walls in between and there is already an AC1300 bridge and local Ethernet switch there for a computer. 

My question is, is it feasible to put a Tivo Roamio Pro in the basement (where there is both FiOS Coax MoCA and Cat6 Ethernet), leave it without a permanent TV connected, and use Minis at both TV locations via Wireless AC Ethernet? 

It *should* have enough bandwidth to stream. Yes, I know it isn't supported by Tivo but I pretty much only need support when I need to change something I don't have access to. What I don't know is if I'm going to have issues with any Tivo functionality by accessing the Roamio entirely through Minis. Can someone tell me if that will be a problem or not? Is there anything that can only be done at the Roamio and not the Mini?


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

If it is a decent wireless signal, it should work fine. Several people are running tivo's using wifi solutions - it isn't officially supported, but tivo doesn't disable the functionality. They just won't diagnose nretwork issues.


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## VirtualViking (Dec 21, 2014)

Thanks, I'm fairly confident the underlying network infrastructure will work and I'm fine with being my own support tech. But to confirm, there is nothing in the Roamio/Mini environment that can only be done on the Roamio (beyond initial setup)? I'm not going to hit any walls during normal use where I have to hook up a TV to the Roamio to say, manage DVR, Netflix and whatnot or apply updates, etc?

I found some reviews from initial release that said there were "DVR management limitations" with the Mini but they didn't go into meaningful detail about what these limitations were. They also could have been resolved in an update since initial release, I don't know. I'm concerned that it might be a dealbreaker for how I want to set it up.


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

Nothing in the design of the TiVos that will prohibit what you are trying to do.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

The limitations of the Mini compared to the main box will be there no matter how you're connected to the main TiVo, i.e. MoCA, Ethernet, etc. The biggest limitation is that you can't flip between the tuners, which could be annoying during March Madness or something, but other than that, it's a great experience. My roommates almost never go in the basement where my TiVo is, they do everything through one of the Minis, and their experience with TiVo is fine. Usually on Sundays when they watch football, there is a tuner free that's not recording football or anything else, so they can still flip back and forth between a game and Redzone with a single tuner.

Wireless bridging should work. I even got mine working over Powerline adapters, but that can be even more hit or miss than wireless. I would keep the wireless gear more than 2 feet apart if you can, most wireless equipment needs to be about 5 feet apart to attenuate the signal enough for it to work properly. A lot tests show a nosedive in speed as the distances closes under 5-10 feet, although your floor could help too.


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## Logic129 (Nov 29, 2014)

I'm running my Mini with a Powerline adapter too and it works great. Like Bigg says, it's hit or miss but it does help that I am using the 600Mbps version. The slower ones will be less reliable and cut out.


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## VirtualViking (Dec 21, 2014)

Bigg said:


> The limitations of the Mini compared to the main box will be there no matter how you're connected to the main TiVo, i.e. MoCA, Ethernet, etc. The biggest limitation is that you can't flip between the tuners, which could be annoying during March Madness or something, but other than that, it's a great experience.


Thanks Bigg, you're hitting the focus of my question. I don't know exactly what you mean by "can't flip between the tuners". My sports watching is pretty much limited to MLB.TV, US Ski Team and Olympics so I don't do a lot of jumping between live TV channels like you would for Sunday/Monday Football or March Madness. But I do flip around occasionally so I'd like to know exactly what that limitation is. What I do very often is watch live TV 20+ minutes late so I can zip through commercials and not "catch up" before the end of the show, i.e. watching a recorded show before it finishes recording. Does that fall into the limitation you're talking about?

I know the networking side inside and out so I'll find the best location for the wireless bridge. I can put the AP anywhere from 20' away to up in the rafters leaving only a subfloor and wood floor in between. I'll definitely find the best possible link and bandwidth.


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## dianebrat (Jul 6, 2002)

VirtualViking said:


> Thanks Bigg, you're hitting the focus of my question. I don't know exactly what you mean by "can't flip between the tuners". My sports watching is pretty much limited to MLB.TV, US Ski Team and Olympics so I don't do a lot of jumping between live TV channels like you would for Sunday/Monday Football or March Madness. But I do flip around occasionally so I'd like to know exactly what that limitation is. What I do very often is watch live TV 20+ minutes late so I can zip through commercials and not "catch up" before the end of the show, i.e. watching a recorded show before it finishes recording. Does that fall into the limitation you're talking about?
> 
> I know the networking side inside and out so I'll find the best location for the wireless bridge. I can put the AP anywhere from 20' away to up in the rafters leaving only a subfloor and wood floor in between. I'll definitely find the best possible link and bandwidth.


Don't rule out Powerline Network Adapters, I'm their #1 fangirl and I'm on my 2nd house where they're my source for the Mini and Media center PC on the 2nd floor, far better solution for me than more wireless.


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## VirtualViking (Dec 21, 2014)

dianebrat said:


> Don't rule out Powerline Network Adapters


Lol, no I didn't rule out Powerline. In fact, I recently implemented powerline adapters to extend a friend's home network from their farm house into a separate horse barn so they can use an IP security camera to monitor a pregnant mare from an iPad. It exceeded Cat6's 300' limit and wireless was too slow at that distance. Powerline network via existing buried electric lines fit the bill. It was easy and met their bandwidth needs. In my case, I want maximum bandwidth at a short distance. Wireless AC (wave 2 - 4x4) is now faster than powerline in that scenario so I'm going with that. I'm a fanboy of bandwidth but very fickle with the technology used to achieve it.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Logic129 said:


> I'm running my Mini with a Powerline adapter too and it works great. Like Bigg says, it's hit or miss but it does help that I am using the 600Mbps version. The slower ones will be less reliable and cut out.


Mine can run fine on either the 200 or 500mbps Powerline adapters, but YMMV, depending on your electrical setup and what other loads are running nearby.



VirtualViking said:


> Thanks Bigg, you're hitting the focus of my question. I don't know exactly what you mean by "can't flip between the tuners". My sports watching is pretty much limited to MLB.TV, US Ski Team and Olympics so I don't do a lot of jumping between live TV channels like you would for Sunday/Monday Football or March Madness. But I do flip around occasionally so I'd like to know exactly what that limitation is. What I do very often is watch live TV 20+ minutes late so I can zip through commercials and not "catch up" before the end of the show, i.e. watching a recorded show before it finishes recording. Does that fall into the limitation you're talking about?


What I mean is that on a multi-tuner TiVo, i.e. anything recent, you can hit right arrow and go down one or two to see what else is recording or tuned on the other tuners. With the Mini, if there is an extra tuner available, you can flip channels all day by hitting last, ch up/down or punching in the number, but you can't switch which tuner you are using, so you wipe out your buffer every time you change the channel. The scenario where I have found it extremely useful is if all 4 tuners are recording, and I want to flip between games (that I am recording) live, I can do that on the XL4.

With the Mini, if there are no tuners available (or even if there are) you can still watch one thing that's recording live by going into the Now Playing List (or whatever it's called these days), and FF'ing to live, which is within a second or two of true live (there's hard drive delay on the main TiVo anyway), but there is no easy way to then switch to something else that's currently recording. Also, if you are already recording something on ESPN (Comcast 1605), and you punch 1605 in on the main TiVo, you will go to the tuner that's already recording, whereas if you do the same on the TiVo Mini, you will get a different tuner than the one recording, thus using up another tuner, and making it unavailable for other Minis to use, and you will not able to tune to live at all if all tuners are used up, even if you are already recording 1605. However, to get around that, you'd have to go to the recording, and then FF to (almost) live.

You can also start a show that's already recording and catch up. So it's really only a limitation in specific circumstances where you have a whole bunch of live stuff to record, barely enough tuners, and you want to flip between them while they are recording. I.e. March Madness or football. I record all the sports events I am going to watch, and I have told my roommates to do that same, so that we know we have a tuner "blocked out" for that event.

I also have 3 roommates, and we all share an XL4 with 3 Minis, which works pretty well, but it does put the XL4 under heavy load, and can occasionally require some very creative tuner scheduling. Last year during the Olympics and then March Madness, I had to manually edit some of the recordings on a weekly basis during Sochi and March Madness, but we were always able to get what everyone wanted. The padding really screws with tuner allocation, and some shows are even scheduled to start a minute early or end a minute late, they must do that just to screw with DVR users or something.



> I know the networking side inside and out so I'll find the best location for the wireless bridge. I can put the AP anywhere from 20' away to up in the rafters leaving only a subfloor and wood floor in between. I'll definitely find the best possible link and bandwidth.


Yeah, sounds like you're got your ducks in a row on the networking side of things.



dianebrat said:


> Don't rule out Powerline Network Adapters, I'm their #1 fangirl and I'm on my 2nd house where they're my source for the Mini and Media center PC on the 2nd floor, far better solution for me than more wireless.


I have a pair, and they are solidly mediocre. I couldn't in good faith recommend them to anyone unless they had no other options. I would recommend, in this order:

1. CAT-6
2. CAT-5e
3. MoCA
4. Wireless AC
5. Powerline AV



VirtualViking said:


> Lol, no I didn't rule out Powerline. In fact, I recently implemented powerline adapters to extend a friend's home network from their farm house into a separate horse barn so they can use an IP security camera to monitor a pregnant mare from an iPad. It exceeded Cat6's 300' limit and wireless was too slow at that distance. Powerline network via existing buried electric lines fit the bill. It was easy and met their bandwidth needs. In my case, I want maximum bandwidth at a short distance. Wireless AC (wave 2 - 4x4) is now faster than powerline in that scenario so I'm going with that. I'm a fanboy of bandwidth but very fickle with the technology used to achieve it.


MoCA can run well over 100m on coax, even though QAM signals would probably not work reliably at that distance on RG-6. That's probably a bad solution in that case though if you don't already have coax to work with. Wireless can run 50+ mbps several miles if you have the right antennas and radios, and mount them correctly. Powerline is a nice option to have, but it really should be a last resort. I have it only because I bought a pair of adapters for use in an apartment, so when I moved into my current house, they were extra, so I used them instead of doing it the "right" way for my situation and getting MoCA adapters. When I own a house, it will have CAT-6 in every room, and to the ONT if it's in a FIOS area, even if some drilling and fishing is required.


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## VirtualViking (Dec 21, 2014)

Bigg said:


> you can't switch which tuner you are using, so you wipe out your buffer every time you change the channel.


Ah, there's the rub! I get it now, one tuner so you lose the buffer when flipping around. Thanks for enlightening me, Bigg! I would run into that on occasion. Then again it's not so bad since I would only run into that when I'm flipping through Live TV channels in a "couch potato" mode trying to avoid commercials. Part of what I want to do with the Tivo is to change my viewing habits into a more streaming thought model. Cord cutting with training wheels so to speak. That limitation would push me in that direction anyway.

It's just me and my wife so while we currently fill up our 2 tuners fairly often right now I doubt we would fill up 6 even with 2 Minis going. There are only so many Lifetime, Hallmark & Oxygen movie channels she can record at once, right? (I know, pity me. But I knew what I was in for when I signed up.)

I've also had a revelation that all I really need to pass through the floor is HDMI and controller access. If the Tivo has an RF remote it should get through the floor to a Roamio in the basement rafters. Then a wireless HDMI bridge to the TV and I'm using the Roamio instead of a Mini. I'll have to research wireless HDMI... (lol, I'm so falling down the rabbit hole)



Bigg said:


> I have a pair, and they are solidly mediocre. I couldn't in good faith recommend them to anyone unless they had no other options. I would recommend, in this order:
> 
> 1. CAT-6
> 2. CAT-5e
> ...


I pretty much agree but one thing Powerline AV really has going for it is distance, especially on long runs with no outlets such as a buried circuit to a different building. They will go 3x the distance of all the wired solutions and much cheaper than the antenna setup you would need for wireless. You also need to break up Wireless AC now into 1x1, 2x2, 3x3 and the newly available Wave 2 4x4. Also the MoCA into 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0.

So the real-world approximate bandwidth breakdown I've come up with is:
1. Cat-6 (10000Mbps) If you have a 10Gb router which is currently uncommon for home use. A Gigabit router makes it equal to Cat 5e. But if you're going to run wire, wire for the future.
2. Cat-5e (1000Mbps)
3. AC Wave 2 4x4 (6-800Mbps)/MoCA 2.0 PHY (700Mbps) *
4. MoCA 2.0 (400Mbps)
5. AC 3x3 (3-400Mbps)
6. MoCA 1.1 (175Mbps)/AC 2x2 (1-200Mbps) *
7. Powerline AV600 (100-125Mbps)
8. MoCA 1.0 (100Mbps)/Cat-5 (100Mbps)
9. Powerline AV500 (75-100Mbps)
10. AC 1x1 (50-100Mbps)/Powerline AV200 (60-75Mbps) *
11. Wireless N (40-50Mbps)

* Best depends on distance and interference

Keep in mind that all of these types need to be identical on both sides of each link or the faster end will fall back to the speed of the slower end. So if you have a Wave 2 AC 4x4 router but a AC 2x2 adapter, you're getting 2x2 speed and no more. You also need to divide these values by the # of clients actively routing through any particular point on your network, be it a wireless AP, MoCA interface, Powerline interface or Ethernet switch uplink. That's the part that trips many people up, knowing what segments get shared and what aren't. Most don't even think about that part. Regardless of the bandwidth at the device, your bandwidth ceiling is your smallest shared segment of your network route. That's why I have multiple small switches and multiple wireless APs on different channels. Not for extended coverage, but to reduce link sharing for bandwidth!


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

VirtualViking said:


> Ah, there's the rub! I get it now, one tuner so you lose the buffer when flipping around. Thanks for enlightening me, Bigg! I would run into that on occasion. Then again it's not so bad since I would only run into that when I'm flipping through Live TV channels in a "couch potato" mode trying to avoid commercials. Part of what I want to do with the Tivo is to change my viewing habits into a more streaming thought model. Cord cutting with training wheels so to speak. That limitation would push me in that direction anyway.


Glad you've got it now. I've been binge watching and watching whenever I want basically forever, first with VCRs and then with TiVo. The point of the DVR is to avoid needing to flip channels, if you record stuff you like, it will be there on the NPL when you want to watch TV. However, at the same time, I've seen almost all the good content leave linear TV, and basically PBS, HBO, and sports are left, with an occasional show coming from something else. I mainly see the limitations of the Mini applying to news and sports, where live viewing makes sense.



> It's just me and my wife so while we currently fill up our 2 tuners fairly often right now I doubt we would fill up 6 even with 2 Minis going. There are only so many Lifetime, Hallmark & Oxygen movie channels she can record at once, right? (I know, pity me. But I knew what I was in for when I signed up.)


If capacity is an issue, Weaknees has a 6TB Roamio Pro/Plus...



> I've also had a revelation that all I really need to pass through the floor is HDMI and controller access. If the Tivo has an RF remote it should get through the floor to a Roamio in the basement rafters. Then a wireless HDMI bridge to the TV and I'm using the Roamio instead of a Mini. I'll have to research wireless HDMI... (lol, I'm so falling down the rabbit hole)


It more or less works. I had one in an apartment and it was OK, although it made the HDMI unlock/re-lock process a little long and painful. It's sitting in the closet, as I have roommates now.



> I pretty much agree but one thing Powerline AV really has going for it is distance, especially on long runs with no outlets such as a buried circuit to a different building. They will go 3x the distance of all the wired solutions and much cheaper than the antenna setup you would need for wireless. You also need to break up Wireless AC now into 1x1, 2x2, 3x3 and the newly available Wave 2 4x4. Also the MoCA into 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0.


True, I guess they are good enough, but they just can't get anywhere near where the wireless solutions are throughput wise. I didn't realize that they worked over such distance. I guess house size has nothing to do with their performance then, more just random chance as to whether the circuits are well set up for PowerLine.



> So the real-world approximate bandwidth breakdown I've come up with is:
> 1. Cat-6 (10000Mbps) If you have a 10Gb router which is currently uncommon for home use. A Gigabit router makes it equal to Cat 5e. But if you're going to run wire, wire for the future.
> 2. Cat-5e (1000Mbps)
> 3. AC Wave 2 4x4 (6-800Mbps)/MoCA 2.0 PHY (700Mbps) *
> ...


3. I've read awful things about the latest AC routers, and the real-world performance I've seen from tests is around 150-300mbps.
4. There are no MoCA 2.0 adapters available. I suppose you could get a pair of those Netgear Wireless MoCA bridges or a pair of the new Verizon routers, but it would cost a pretty penny. OTOH, you could put up more 5ghz APs with them to improve coverage.
9. The PowerLine stuff is VooDoo magic. I used to get about 25mbps on my PowerLine AV500, now I get about 40mbps.
11. My Wifi N900 router and Apple Macbook Pro can do well over 110mbps, at least they could for the brief period of time that Comcast could actually provide that much bandwidth. I'm limited by Comcast now at around 60-70mbps. And I haven't truly tested the Wifi N900 connection with a LAN transfer.

True, there can be bottlenecks, although on a home network, you'd rarely see more than one user using much bandwidth at any one given time, other than on the internet, where you should be limited by your ISP, unless you have Google Fiber or something.

I'm much more concerned about coverage with wireless routers, I figure beyond that, as long as I can saturate my internet connection over wireless, I'm good to go.


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## VirtualViking (Dec 21, 2014)

Bigg said:


> If capacity is an issue, Weaknees has a 6TB Roamio Pro/Plus...


lol, no. The issue is being a grown man who can't use his big screen TV to watch or record anything because the wife is using both tuners to record crap like "Love at the Christmas Table" and "[whatevered] at 17"... again!
Welcome to married guy problems.



Bigg said:


> 3. I've read awful things about the latest AC routers, and the real-world performance I've seen from tests is around 150-300mbps.


This was true on initial release with initial firmware. Some really critical functionality was disabled. A classic case of management pushing things out the door before engineers finished nailing down the code. That's fixed now in a recent firmware update.


Bigg said:


> 9. The PowerLine stuff is VooDoo magic. I used to get about 25mbps on my PowerLine AV500, now I get about 40mbps.


lol, it definitely can seem like voodoo. The problem with it is that anything you plug in can be detrimental to powerline bandwidth. Its not intuitive at all as to what does and doesn't have an impact. You can only really know by hooking up an oscilloscope to every electrical device you have to see how much interference it generates and nobody in their right mind would do that. However it's really impressive when you have two adapters with nothing but 500' of buried romex in between them. The darn thing works!


Bigg said:


> 11. My Wifi N900 router and Apple Macbook Pro can do well over 110mbps


True, that Wireless N value was for 2.5Ghz. 5Ghz N will get you in that range. By the time I got to N I wasn't paying much attention anymore.



Bigg said:


> True, there can be bottlenecks, although on a home network, you'd rarely see more than one user using much bandwidth at any one given time, other than on the internet, where you should be limited by your ISP, unless you have Google Fiber or something.


I'm finding that this is changing pretty quickly. In my family and other families I know, Middle/High School aged kids nowadays are eating bandwidth like crazy. Between local and online gaming, running their own gaming servers, social networks, streaming video, music & video libraries, torrents... their bandwidth demands are downright impressive. They're not just saturating their IP provider link, I've seen their local traffic clogging up poorly designed home networks. I know kids who realize their internet connection only does so much so they trickle things in at night and want to store them here, send them there. Its amazing to watch a mind completely developed in the Information Age. On one hand they're stupid teenagers, on the other hand even the non-technical kids really know how to leverage a network. What they're naturally inclined to do is really bandwidth intensive. Just slapping whatever together and establishing connectivity is quickly becoming not good enough. I'm starting to see kids needing actual network design in home networks now.


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## mchief (Sep 10, 2005)

My granddaughter (14) informed me today, that her generation were all tech gurus. My reply left her speechless. "my generation invented all the tech you are now so good at".


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## VirtualViking (Dec 21, 2014)

mchief said:


> My granddaughter (14) informed me today, that her generation were all tech gurus. My reply left her speechless. "my generation invented all the tech you are now so good at".


Luckily for us the old paradigm still holds true. Should it become necessary, the wisdom of age can always disarm the bravado and exuberance of youth. 
It's also funny how closely a child will listen to a "Network Architecture 101" lesson when it directly impacts their digital life. Laundry still remains outside their personal firewall.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

VirtualViking said:


> lol, no. The issue is being a grown man who can't use his big screen TV to watch or record anything because the wife is using both tuners to record crap like "Love at the Christmas Table" and "[whatevered] at 17"... again!
> Welcome to married guy problems.


Well, I guess that's up to you and your wife. I was just saying the technical capability to have 6 tuners and 6TB of disk space is available if you want it.



> This was true on initial release with initial firmware. Some really critical functionality was disabled. A classic case of management pushing things out the door before engineers finished nailing down the code. That's fixed now in a recent firmware update.


Interesting. Good to know. Are routers like the AC-87U offering enhanced performance with a mix of 2x2 AC and 3x3 N clients, even though they are not 4x4 AC like the AC-87U? Or is the AC68U good enough at this point?



> lol, it definitely can seem like voodoo. The problem with it is that anything you plug in can be detrimental to powerline bandwidth. Its not intuitive at all as to what does and doesn't have an impact. You can only really know by hooking up an oscilloscope to every electrical device you have to see how much interference it generates and nobody in their right mind would do that. However it's really impressive when you have two adapters with nothing but 500' of buried romex in between them. The darn thing works!


Yeah, that actually is kind of amazing.



> True, that Wireless N value was for 2.5Ghz. 5Ghz N will get you in that range. By the time I got to N I wasn't paying much attention anymore.


Ah ok, yeah, my 2.4ghz N is something like 25mbps, since it is getting a lot more interference, and in the 2.4ghz spectrum, you really have to run 20mhz channels. I'm running a 40mhz up on 5ghz, so the 5ghz channel really rocks and rolls compared to the 2.4ghz.



> I'm finding that this is changing pretty quickly. In my family and other families I know, Middle/High School aged kids nowadays are eating bandwidth like crazy. Between local and online gaming, running their own gaming servers, social networks, streaming video, music & video libraries, torrents... their bandwidth demands are downright impressive. They're not just saturating their IP provider link, I've seen their local traffic clogging up poorly designed home networks. I know kids who realize their internet connection only does so much so they trickle things in at night and want to store them here, send them there. Its amazing to watch a mind completely developed in the Information Age. On one hand they're stupid teenagers, on the other hand even the non-technical kids really know how to leverage a network. What they're naturally inclined to do is really bandwidth intensive. Just slapping whatever together and establishing connectivity is quickly becoming not good enough. I'm starting to see kids needing actual network design in home networks now.


LAN gaming doesn't use much, and everything else is internet-based, so you'd be back to being limited to internet bandwidth. I have no doubt that bandwidth consumption is going way up, but it's almost all device to internet, the device being a PC, XBone, iPad, smartphone, etc, etc.

Unless you've got GF, some other fast fiber connection, or maybe TWC Maxx (on the download), an N900 router will be able to saturate the internet connection anyway. The need for fast home LANs on a wide scale will pick up a lot when FIOS gets around to offering gigabit internet at a reasonable price. They have everything in place already up to the ONT, so it's just a matter of when they want to start offering to uncap their GPON system, and start rolling trucks to users that don't have Ethernet installed to their routers but can't handle running CAT-6 themselves.

GF flips the whole paradigm of the internet connection as a bottleneck right on it's head. All of the sudden, anything less than GigE will put the bottleneck on the LAN.


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