As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
Do I need to replace my router?
Scorched
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Thanks in advance for the help!
So I live in a communal flat with 5 other people.
No matter where we put the router, there's always someone who can't connect. Moreover; the rest of us can connect fine - except that our connections will be lost every other hour or so. At this point; the wireless signal will be absolutely fine - but none of us can reconnect until we turn the router off and on again. We don't have to wait more than a second to do this either - so clearly no heat issues there.
Unfortunately, we can't switch to a wired network; because we're English and the English have never heard of cable routing. So we're stuck with wireless.
So, two questions:
1) What the hell is happening to our router?
2.) Will replacing it with a fairly high end one help? And if so, what should I choose? Dual-band, obviously, but I don't know what's a good brand anymore. Netgear seems to be the standard, but I don't trust their products at all.
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Edit: I was going to add the second router to the network; rather than outright replace the old one so everyone can get coverage. My dad seems to have done this in my parent's house, and that seems to work fine. Is there any reason that wouldn't work? Do I need to think of any extra gear to set this up? We have three connect points, so that's no issue.
So I live in a communal flat with 5 other people.
No matter where we put the router, there's always someone who can't connect. Moreover; the rest of us can connect fine - except that our connections will be lost every other hour or so. At this point; the wireless signal will be absolutely fine - but none of us can reconnect until we turn the router off and on again. We don't have to wait more than a second to do this either - so clearly no heat issues there.
Unfortunately, we can't switch to a wired network; because we're English and the English have never heard of cable routing. So we're stuck with wireless.
So, two questions:
1) What the hell is happening to our router?
2.) Will replacing it with a fairly high end one help? And if so, what should I choose? Dual-band, obviously, but I don't know what's a good brand anymore. Netgear seems to be the standard, but I don't trust their products at all.
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Edit: I was going to add the second router to the network; rather than outright replace the old one so everyone can get coverage. My dad seems to have done this in my parent's house, and that seems to work fine. Is there any reason that wouldn't work? Do I need to think of any extra gear to set this up? We have three connect points, so that's no issue.
Scorched on
0
Posts
Linksys is fairly decent, the problem with networking hardware is that it is so prone to failure regardless of brand that it can be difficult to find a reliable router. Especially at the general consumer level.
Some routers have weird limitations on clients connecting. It could be that, or it could just be networking demons.
There are a lot of networking demons.
I'll have a talk with the rest of the flat to see if they can spare me a few hours to flash the Firmware. I'm pretty much the only go-to guy they have for it; so they'd probably give me the OK.
In the meantime though, I have to figure out why I can't reach my router on the standard IP anymore. Now there's a new development.
If you decide to buy a new one, you could try the DD-WRT/Tomato route if your router supports it. If you happen to brick the router, you were going to replace it anyway. If you don't brick it, hooray! Maybe it'll be awesome.
From experience, like Djeet said, manufacturer firmware can have some really stupid bugs. For instance, I have a Linksys E4200 and was running on 1.0.00, skipped 1.0.01 and went to 1.0.02...and DHCP stopped functioning. Once my initial lease was up, it wouldn't renew. I ran Wireshark and watched my PC broadcast DHCP requests for several minutes with zero response from the router. The web interface also became nearly unusable due to poor performance. I backed up to 1.0.01 and it was fine. You would think a major issue like this would prompt them to release a quick fix, but no. It took them months to release 1.0.03, which I still haven't upgraded to.