It feels a bit like I’ve stepped back in time this week as I have some new home/office stuff coming in that in some ways is a bit of a throwback.

Yesterday was part one, when I installed a wired gateway for my home internet connection.

That’s right; the hardware that connects my home to the internet and does all the router-y things for all the devices I have doesn’t have wireless antennae anymore. It’s wired-only. I got tired of wondering if the “outages” I was experiencing were my wireless connection, the router itself, or the internet connection, so I decided to uncouple some of the factors involved there.

The model router I picked up is the TP-Link TL-R600VPN. It’s a super-simple piece of hardware and so far I’m pretty happy with it. Pretty basic controls, no-nonsense setup, and no limits on reserved DHCP addresses – which is pretty good, because right now that list looks like this and I’ve only set up half the devices in the house:

It’s only been about a half-day, but already I feel like things are more stable and performance seems better. I ran some numbers on the internet connection that lead me to believe that my router is at fault, and if that’s the case, then I’m kind of disappointed. I’ll talk more about those numbers later today – and tell you why you should do what you can to make sure your home is wired for ethernet.