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

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!