Stupid router tricks

[kate_nepveu]

This weekend I installed a Belkin N Wireless Router (F5D8233-4). (Our old router required rebooting every eight hours of running BitTorrent, which was tedious.) It's working fine for Chad, who's directly plugged into it through an Ethernet cable, but I'm experiencing annoying wireless connection disruptions.

Specifically, connecting to the Internet starts timing out; I click on Windows XP's little Wireless Network Connection Status icon, and in the resulting dialog box I see the name for the network flickering off and on (the name itself), and the speed jumping between 54.0 Mbps to 1.0 Mbps. Clicking "repair" fixes this, for a while, or sometimes it comes back on its own; in two hours this has happened at least six times, while I did nothing other than surf the web.

I pretty much installed this with the defaults, except for enabling encryption (128bit WEP) and setting up a forwarded port for torrenting. We have DSL, so PPPoE, but since Chad's having no problems I doubt the problem's on that end. My laptop has b/g wireless; the router also supports the draft n standard, because Chad's new tablet does. The user manual is not helpful. Does anyone have any suggestions of what settings to futz with or other troubleshooting to do?

Comments

[montoya.livejournal.com]

I have no useful information other than to advise you to make sure you've upgraded the firmware to the latest version. There's so much flakiness with wireless stuff that it's the single most frustrating technology I ever use, and one of the few where I sometimes just throw my hands up in the air and give up.

[skapusniak.livejournal.com]

See if there's anything listed under (takes a deep breath before telling you how to get tere)

Right Click menu of Wireless Connection icon
Status
Properties Button
General Tab
Configure
Advanced Tab

...that looks like has anything to do with connection speed. My wireless interface would keep trying to regnegotiate to get the 'best speed', causing it to jump around all over the place and randomly fall over, until I manually told it to stop trying to do that and stick to 54Mbps. Rate/54, rather than Rate/Best Speed on that advanced tab my wireless interface, but it'll be specific to the wireless interface hardware if you have such an option at all.

Also if there are other peoples wireless networks about, try changing the wireless channel used by the router to one that none of the others are using rather than sticking with the default.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

If your wireless card has an option to minimize power use, turn that 'feature' off. Yeah, it'll shorten your battery life, but it'll also make the thing quit trying to use less power to maintain the signal (which causes seesawing, except it looks like yours never goes back on the upswing).

[angelhedgie.livejournal.com]

Also, most routers ship on channel 6. Try switching that to channel 1 or 11 - since most people ignore this, those two frequencies tend to be relatively empty of traffic.

Also, please, please tell me you changed the router's SSID (the name of the router that it broadcasts)?