Comments | keenman: Wireless access points

keenman

Wireless access points

Oct 29, 2008 08:17

The wireless functionality of my Qwest router has pretty much died. It's so bad that 3G is more reliable and faster for my iPhone than my wireless at home now. To replace it, I'm looking into getting a separate wireless access point. Anyone have any familiarity with these? I was looking at newegg and saw http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ( Read more... )

Comments 4

tkat October 29 2008, 23:28:26 UTC

I'd seriously recommend against any of the canned, available-at-Fry's consumer level products. I think you should either (a) get one with solid hardware and install a solid third-party firmware on it, or (b) get something targeted at enterprises. Both will perform much more reliably, and probably transfer packets faster too, than the pre-boxed solutions. Between these options, (a) is much cheaper than (b ( ... )

keenman October 30 2008, 01:22:44 UTC

Wow - thanks for the great advice! I only really started having problems when I got my iPhone. I'll totally take the spare WRT54GL you have off your hands. :-) I'll give you a shout and we can talk more about it.

teknodave October 30 2008, 06:08:04 UTC

Personally, I have had nothing but problems with Linksys routers, and a friend who used to work for Geek Squad is not a big fan of them either. I have seen some 802.11n routers for NetGear on NewEgg there, and one runs at 5GHz, which is good, since the routers that run at 2.4GHz can pick up interference from your trusty microwave in the kitchen.

Whenever someone was cooking something, I had to stop all downloading on the computer, if something was coming down at the time the microwave finished, I had to reboot the router.

But it sounds like you have a good one to give to Keenan, so man, take it! ;)

(Plus, I had a horrid experience talking with Linksys support a few years back, hopefully it is still not outsourced overseas...it was worse than a root canal!)

tkat October 30 2008, 06:36:31 UTC

Your point is a good one: most Linksys routers are crap. Among other things, they tend to have so little RAM that the entire Linksys OS can't all fit in memory at once -- it tries to do some kind of clever paging.

The GL is an exception: it's basically the original hardware platform of the G before they started trying to shave production costs down. So theory goes it's built with higher quality products. But even beyond that, it has full RAM, and it's a well-understood, open platform that third parties have built replacement OSes for.

Once you install such a third party OS, of which Tomato is one of the popular ones, it's arguably not a Linksys router anymore. :)