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

[angelhedgie.livejournal.com]

A bit more explanation on the channels:

While we have, in theory 11 channels to play with, in reality they're close enough in frequency to each other so that they bleed into each other. Only 1, 6, and 11 are far enough apart that they don't interfere which each other. So remember - there are only three channels on a wireless router.

[kate_nepveu]

It defaults to 11, and yes.

I may have played with a random setting that eased the problem; I haven't been online for a lengthy period since then so I'm not sure. I just wish I remember what now.