Advice on a replacement home office 802.11G router?

[bjarvis]

My old Linksys wireless router died a couple of weeks ago. It was a reliable and functional unit so I decided to replace it with another Linksys unit, esp. since I could just dash down the street to Staples.

Bad move. The WRK54G isn't behaving well. It drops incoming connections, has a high rate of packet loss and is generally very slow in operation. In general, it performs incredibly poorly when compared to its late predecessor.

Anyone have a model of wireless router they would recommend?

Comments

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

A friend has had good luck with a Belkin, not sure of the mod#.

Have you checked sites such as Seattle Wireless to see if there's alternate firmware for the WRK54G? I found a new image for my Linksys access point (WAP54G) and it performs much better, as well as being able to adjust Tx power 8-}.

You've already done the obvious hacks like moving off of channel 6, right?

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's no firmware upgrade currently. And yup, one of the first actions on installation was moving to anywhere but channel 6. :-)

[deege.livejournal.com]

I love my D-Link DI-784. I have had it for years and it never lets me down, plus it's an A/B/G router so on segments where I get G interference (from other devices) I use A.

I recommend it highly. In fact, my entire home network is D-Link except for my NAS.

I am such a geek...

[allanh.livejournal.com]

Anything but Linksys. I had precisely the same problems as you've described with the last three Linksys wireless products I've installed, both for myself and for customers.

Thge two WAPs I've had the best luck with in terms of speed and signal strength: (1) A "cheapie" Motorola WR850G that I picked up at Target (I was desperate) one weekend, and (2) any of the SonicWALL firewalls incorporating wireless routing (TZ-150W, TZ-170W, etc.).

The Motorola is presently providing a surprisingly strong wireless signal to all three floors of our townhome, including both the TiVo located in the deepest, darkest, furthest away corner of the ground floor, and the TiVo located in the master bedroom on the top floor. (And for a fair distance outside of the building, which is why I'm using encryption AND mac address filtering AND firewalling that subnet off from the rest of the home network.)

The SonicWALLs are probably overkill for most people ... but they include the ability to force wireless clients to authenticate via a built-in IPsec VPN, as well as WPA encryption. You, however, are enough of a geek (no really, from me that's a high compliment!) that I thought SonicWALL was worth mentioning. They also have surprisingly strong, clear signals.

Does this help?

Re: I am such a geek...

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Ironically, the wireless portion for our laptops works just fine. The problem seems to be performance for the cabled 100baseT workstations and especially for externally initiated inbound communications (like incoming SMTP and HTTP traffic). Go figure.

I'll take a look at the SonicWALL units... a geek can't have too many features, ya know. :-) Thanks!

[urbear]

I've used a number of Linksys routers, and all of them seem to have a problem that's also occasionally found in other brands: the router tends to crash with heavy use. This behavior seems to be related to connection table clean-up; it appears that if your machines make connections to many, many outside systems (during a Bittorrent download, for instance) over a relatively short period (on the order of four or five days) a table overflows and everything grinds to an immediate stop.

Linksys also makes a solution to the problem: a series of routers than run Linux internally, and can accept alternative firmware. There's a thriving cottage industry based on these devices and related products; you can get a feel for it on the forums maintained here.

I now use a Linksys WRT54GL router with an aftermarket firmware package called Talisman from a company by the name of Sveasoft. Not only does this package fix the connection problem, it allows you to tweak many router features that are normally inaccessible (like wireless transmit power) and offers some very useful additional features -- VLANs and VPNs, for instance. If Talisman isn't appropriate for some reason, there are many other open-source alternatives.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I'll take a look into this! Thanks!

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

We don't put our system to the tests somebody like allanh does, but when I bought a new Wifi router recently, research suggested Linksys models were problematic (being disloyal to one of the sources of household income doesn't trouble me.) The Belkin Pre-N model I chose has been satisfactory on all counts, with the one flaw that it doesn't work well with Paul's Cisco-configured laptop (which doesn't work well with anything!)

[excessor.livejournal.com]

It gets old having my Cisco-configured laptop that works everywhere but in my Cisco-equipped home.