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February 24, 2008

Another day, another broken router ()

by fluffy at 5:24 PM
So much for the Buffalo WHR-G125s being any good. The wireless stopped working entirely on the one hooked up to my DSL modem, and the WDS-bridged one doesn't seem to want to work as a router. Meanwhile there's something wonky going on with DHCP at sonic.net which is preventing me from reconnecting, so I'm on via GPRS/Bluetooth right now. Ugh.

11g is pretty assy anyway though. Seeing as how the only devices which "need" 11g connectivity are my Wii and my old Powerbook, I went and just ordered a pair of Netgear 11n bridges. I'll just use my G5 as my router and 11g access point, and the Netgear bridges will (hopefully) give me much better network performance for the bridged devices anyway, as well as for my MacBook. Hopefully they'll also arrive sooner rather than later, as my parents are visiting me for a week in a few days, and of course TiVo gets very unhappy if it's without fresh TV listings for too long. I guess I can try using my Airport Express as a WDS→Ethernet bridge in the meantime (though that always was fairly unreliable).

6:25 PM Yay for neighbors who have an unsecured AirPort access point.

6:52 PM Hm, looks like the original base router is working again. Maybe I can salvage it after all. (However I did want to upgrade my network to 11n anyway, especially the bridged portion.)

Comments

#10497 02/24/2008 07:56 pm
Okay, so now my network is back to exactly the point it was before it stopped working today, and is working fine. I wonder what happened. Oh well.
#10513 02/29/2008 08:48 am
How is 11g assy? I am on b now, and am thinking of upgrading since the new laptop can use g. No n devices around. Isn't the n standard still not a standard?
-bill
#10519 02/29/2008 10:01 am
g is too slow to stream media reliably. 54Mbps refers to the transport rate, not the data rate, and anyway 54Mbps is only under extremely ideal conditions, which are basically impossible because of all the other chatter in the 2.4Ghz band (not just other networks). 11n is in a largely untapped bandwidth area, and it's also much more robust against other stuff which does encroach upon it (so when everyone's using 11n it'll still perform a lot better relative to its ideal conditions).

Also, it doesn't help that a lot of vendors have tried to pave over the problems with 11g by "extending" it in ways which are extremely hostile to other 11g networks, and which basically assume they're the only network in an area which does it. Sort of a scorched earth approach to frequency sharing. (Plus, g's insistence on backwards compatibility with b didn't help matters at all.)

n isn't quite a standard yet but it's so close to it that there's no risk to your devices suddenly becoming obsolete or whatever. It's in the final draft stage and any changes to the standard before ratification must be done in ways which only require firmware updates at worst.
#10521 tracker (unregistered) 03/01/2008 04:37 pm
fluffy:
g is too slow to stream media reliably. 54Mbps refers to the transport rate, not the data rate, and anyway 54Mbps is only under extremely ideal conditions, which are basically impossible because of all the other chatter in the 2.4Ghz band (not just other networks). 11n is in a largely untapped bandwidth area, and it's also much more robust against other stuff which does encroach upon it (so when everyone's using 11n it'll still perform a lot better relative to its ideal conditions).

Also, it doesn't help that a lot of vendors have tried to pave over the problems with 11g by "extending" it in ways which are extremely hostile to other 11g networks, and which basically assume they're the only network in an area which does it. Sort of a scorched earth approach to frequency sharing. (Plus, g's insistence on backwards compatibility with b didn't help matters at all.)

n isn't quite a standard yet but it's so close to it that there's no risk to your devices suddenly becoming obsolete or whatever. It's in the final draft stage and any changes to the standard before ratification must be done in ways which only require firmware updates at worst.
#10545 03/05/2008 05:18 am
oh, i think our phones are in 2.4 - that would be a lot of interference, i bet. can you access the same router from a b and from an n laptop?
-bill
#10548 03/05/2008 09:30 am
Generally an N radio will be in either 2.4 or 5, not both. B/G are 2.4, A/N are 5. (This is why B and G are compatible but A and B are not.) I think my N access points are 5-only, and also have an A compatibility mode, though I've set them to N-only.

My network setup looks something like this right now:
router/G--N~~~~~~~~~~~~~~N--G

so basically I have two overlapping G networks (using the same SSID and encryption) and an N network. As far as the G access points are concerned they're just connected to the same wired network (since that's how the N bridge appears to them).