Problematic router

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 06:24pm

Since I switched over to my WRT54G router a week and a half ago I have been experiencing issues regarding outgoing connections, the most noticeable symptom being three quarters of the web sites timing out. Of these I could simply hit refresh and all would be well for a time but the remainder would take a while to access. Once the connection was established all was well and it appeared that I was getting faster speeds than before (one tranfer that used to max out at 600kB/sec was getting almost 1MB/sec). That didn’t help my web browsing which can establish a dozen connections for a single page.

Last weekend I tried looking into this (the word ‘connection’ can be used in too many ways in regard to a router) and didn’t have much luck except for some sites that talked about problems with Microsoft Vista and stateful firewalls. So I turned off the stateful firewall and for about five minutes all was well. But I am not sure the improvement wasn’t just from rebooting the router…

Since I only shut down the machine that used to be my router (and it was still in place as I didn’t reorganise my desk as planned) it was a simple matter of switching the cable from the cable modem back and turning it on.

The result?

Problem free browsing.

I have a bookmarks folder of fifteen sites that at least once a day I middle click on in order to load them all up in tabs within Firefox. A single middle click and a minute later (some of the sites are slow) they were all fully loaded (including all images) without a single timeout.

It is a conundrum as I quite liked having a dedicated device for the core network functions of internet gateway, dhcp and dns. I will have to investigate further with the current firmware the router is running as well as looking into another firmware or even another router…

(I mention another firmware or another router as the web interface itself of the router was timing out on one in five pages which made configuration annoying…)

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