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

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

Even theoretically, it's very low-power radio on a highly contested band where you're picking up signals that are below the noise floor only due to some extremely clever techniques -- which is as reliable as it sounds. The band is affected by nearby microwave emitters, varying from microwave ovens through every single wireless device out there (baby monitors, remote video devices, etc.etc.) to the microwave-range "we've taken up a spot on the tallest building around and we'll give you line of sight internet from it" providers, it's affected (a lot) by concrete floors and walls (which typically have grounded reinforcement grids), etc.

The wireless modems I'm now supporting (Zyxel 2602s, for the cognoscenti -- the C61/C63 models and the newer D1A/D3A) have an alleged failure mode where if you put them in a confined space, the reflections back to the antenna cause the entire networking module to crash on a regular basis, including the wired sections. That's presumably a design flaw, but just to say -- it can be a lot worse than simply not getting a connection.

WEP/WPA have their very own entertaining failure modes, which I'm lucky enough to be mostly ignorant of -- but I did get one customer just today who had two separate wireless clients, neither of which could see the modem's network on-air -- until I disabled the security.

Personally, unless I've got an actual portable device, I prefer a cable.

[kate_nepveu]

That makes sense, thanks, and makes me a little less grumpy about the troubles I'm having.