Wireless Problems

[PJB3589]

Hey all,

I have a Linksys WRT54G v4 and a WMP54G v4. I've started noticing in the last month or so that my Internet connection has been dropping for about a second every so often.. just long enough to kick me off AIM or give me severe lag in any online game. I ran a continous ping to my router, and sure enough, my pings will be at 1-2ms and then shoot up to over 1000ms for one or two pings and then go back down. I've tried changing the channel on the router and either the same thing will happen or I will get pings in triple digits constantly when I do the continous ping. Windows XP and the Linksys Wireless utility will both report good signal strength and quality when this happens.. although XP will show the speed dropping from 54mbps down to 24mbps and then back up, back down.. etc (however the speed fluctuations are rare compared to connection dropping/high router pings).

I think one of the issues here is that most of the people in the development I live in have wireless routers. I'm essentially surrounded on all sides by someone who has one.

FYI, I no longer have any 2.4GHz cordless phones so that's not causing the problems.

Right now I've made a really long cat5 cable to go from my computer to the other side of the house where my router is at. However, I'd rather not leave that stretched across the floor for very long. I'm considering just getting rid of 11g and going 11a to completely avoid all the 2.4GHz signals around me. However, I thought I'd see if you guys had any suggestions before swapping out all my equipment.

Hope most of this made sense.. kinda tired lol.

Thanks,

PJB

[Sunset]

802.1n, MIMO, might help if you are going to change hardware anyway. It does much better with interference of all sorts.

[glc]

Have you tried a firmware upgrade on the router, and a hard reset?

[PJB3589]

I had not upgraded my router (which actually is version 3, not 4) to the latest firmware. I did that this morning. If anything its worse now.. when I'm in Windows just surfing there are no issues (although still some pings go over 1000), however, as soon as I fired up a game (BF2), my pings were all over the place (on the continuous ping to my router) and then I was getting "Request Timed Out" on followed by 5 lines of "Hardware Error" and then a whole bunch of "destination host unreachable" before I did an ipconfig /repair.

This is definately a wireless issue because I have absolutely no problems when I use the cat5 cable I ran across the floor. Unfortunately, that can't stay there much longer and I can't go underneath the floor to run it either (I've tried).

EDIT: Now my wireless will get completely disconnected when I'm in Windows. This was not happening before the firmware update.

[glc]

Keep changing channels till you find one that works better. You may have to go MIMO or N to cut through interference. The cost of that would be about the same as A and A actually has a shorter range than B/G. The cost of getting a professional electrician in there to run you a proper CAT5 cable with wall jacks at each end would probably be about the same if not less.

[PJB3589]

I've been trying to find a better channel.. the best one is the one I'm on now which will do pings over 1000 every so often. The other ones have so much packet loss and the pings are sometimes as high as 3000 and never below the triple digits.

Won't I have the same issues with N or MIMO since they are on the 2.4GHz band and this area is saturated with wireless networks? That's the reason I've been thinking A because no one around me has that (not that I know of anyway). If N or MIMO should work fine, any thoughts as to which one to go with? I've been hesitant of going to pre-N since its only the draft spec. Also, which brand is the best nowadays.. its been a while since I've been router shopping, but Linksys was one of the better ones when I was looking for the one I have now.

EDIT: Just been doing some further reading on an un-official Linksys support forum. Apparently using the WMP54G v4 with the XP WZC utility will cause the random high pings when the rest are at 1ms that I've been experiencing. I've switched back to the Linksys utility; I had stopped using it because I kept getting a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL BSOD when I would try to reconnect to my network after coming out of hibernate.

Thanks for all of your help glc

[Mr N8]

I have the same setup at home and tried updating all firmware on the card and router and still had no success staying connected. I even tried 2 different routers (1 netgear MIMO and a different Linksys). What fixed it was a new NIC. The WMP54G was the problem, it seems, since I've been connected perfectly since putting in the new card.

[Sunset]

I have the same setup at home and tried updating all firmware on the card and router and still had no success staying connected. I even tried 2 different routers (1 netgear MIMO and a different Linksys). What fixed it was a new NIC. The WMP54G was the problem, it seems, since I've been connected perfectly since putting in the new card.


Well that is great news. A big sigh of relief!

:)