bobpeers -> blog

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.