bobpeers -> blog

A few months back I mentioned how I had just bought a Linksys WRT610N dual band router. From day one the wireless performance was very disappointing (it briefly seems OK after installing Intel PROset Wireless software but that didn’t last long) and I’ve tried everything to fix the problem.

My main symptoms were.

• Very low bandwidth that varied wildly. At most I could get maybe 8 Mb/s on my LAN, but this would vary right down to a few b/s. Sometimes downloads would start quite fast but suddenly throttle back to almost nothing and stay there.
• Long delays doing DNS lookups. The status bar in Firefox would say ‘Looking up www.google.com…’ for 5 seconds before anything happened. This did not happen when connected with a wire and changing DNS settings (from OpenDNS to my ISP made no difference). I found someone with the same issue but with no resolution.
• Strangely my connection was always very stable, it never dropped out or disconnected and the signal strength was always good or excellent.
• Even connecting to the routers admin page would often take 20-30 seconds to load.

To name but a few things I tried to fix the problem:

• Reinstalled the routers firmware.
• Turned off the 2.4 MHz channel and only used 5GHz with WPA2 encryption.
• Changed the advanced setting in the router, altered the Beacon Interval and Fragmentation Threshold as suggested on the Linksys forum.
• Tried to trace the problem using Wireshark but I could see nothing obviously wrong.
• Installed the Intel PROSet Wireless software to replace Windows Wireless Zero Configuration and changed the advanced adapter settings.

Not having another laptop with an N wireless card I just assumed that the router was at fault. Plus the fact that sometimes I can see up to 40 other wireless networks from my flat I also thought that interference could be a major factor (even though it wasn’t a problem with my old G router).

I gave up on the problem and just used a wired connection until last week when I noticed there was a new version of the Intel PROset to download (I was using driver 12.2.0.0 now it’s 12.4.0.0) so I installed that.

The difference is astounding to say the least. Using Filezilla to check FTP transfer speeds I’m now getting up to 81Mb/s in the same room as the router and about 60-70Mb/s in my lounge that’s 15 metres and 2 walls from the router.

On top of that the DNS issue has disappeared, so I can finally use my LAN as it was intended. I’ve often read how new firmware can fix a whole host of issues but I’ve never before experienced an improvement like this.

I ordered my new router last week and set it up over the weekend, it’s a Linksys WRT610N, shown here.

First thing is that it looks pretty good for a router, although it takes up more desk space due to the flat design. To avoid this you can attach it to a wall as there are screw holes in the base.

Set up was very easy even though there are lots of settings that are new to me, especially since it has 2 radios it actually has 2 SSIDs each with their own security settings. I didn’t use the included CD as it’s not very difficult to do it without.

I only have one laptop with a wireless adapter (Intel 5300 AGN) so I set the router to only use wireless N and set my laptop up to connect to the 5GHz N radio thereby hopefully reducing the interference with the 34 other networks I can see from my flat, most of which are on the 2.4GHz frequency.

Initial connection was fine but it didn’t take long to realise the connection speed was very bad, plus it would loose the connection on a regular basis. By very bad I mean down to 8 Kb/s! I then updated the firmware on the router as it was not the latest from then Linksys site.

This seemed to help a little but not totally, sometimes times I would get 50Mb/s plus then nothing. Finally I replaced the Windows Zero Configuration with the Intel PROset Wireless Software (I did try to get the software as recommended from the HP support site but the download was 89MB compared to 24 MB from Intel and had an older version of the wireless card driver included for some reason).

This seems to have done the trick at least so far. The connection has not dropped since and the bandwidth seems consistently higher. At least using the Speedtest.net site I can confirm that I’m consistently saturating my internet connection at 50Mb/s.

On another note the Intel software is much more informative than the Windows software as it actually tells you which wireless specification each SSID is transmitting at.

I’ll carry out some more tests on my LAN soon to see what bandwidth I’m actually getting with the new router. One final bonus is that wired connections to my NAS are also considerably faster now that the router had Gigabit Ethernet support.