OT – Wireless Routers

[TF_Mike Herrington]

I am after a good adsl wireless router for home use with good range (even through walls). Looking at a Netgear Rangemax. Currently use a Sagem and range/signal is very poor. Any ideas or suggestions.

Cheers

Mike

[TF_Neil]

I’ve been using these at home and in my office for some time now and have been very impressed with them:-

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0031SUB4S/ref=oh_details_o03_s00_i00

Easy to configure and the performance is excellent

[TF_berry1shahParticipant]

A wireless router is a device in a WLAN (wireless local area network) that determines the next network point to which a packet should be forwarded toward its.

[TF_D.W.]

Firstly Mike, which broadband provider are you with?

Reason I ask this is that to connect the router up to the providers network, you will need a dedicated username & password that is required to be placed in to the router’s firmware itself. A lot of the DSL providers are reluctant to give this information out (SKY being one of them) to stop customers using third party routers and calling them up for support when they have a problem.

Something worth trying before purchasing a new router is to change the channel that the WiFi runs on currently. A lot of routers are factory set to run on a certain channel, and obviously with more devices running on the same channel, you can experience problems with signal levels. Changing to a rarely used channel such as 1, 3, 4 or 13 can make a drastic difference to the signal and reliability.

Another thing worth looking at is placement of the router. If it is surrounded by ornaments (especially ones that contain metal) or underneath a TV, near a cordless phone, etc, the signal can be effected. Same goes if the house itself has a metal frame. If the house has a metal frame, then regardless of router used, you are going to get a poorer signal through walls etc.

Another option that people rarely think about is using one of the solutions that runs through the electrical plug sockets. Maplin are presently doing some that have wifi built in to them. To use these it is a simple task of setting them up as per the instructions with your router information, and then plugging them into a mains socket (this way you can use them up to 300m away from the router as that is how far the data can run through the power lines in the house!!). That would be like having the router in the same room of the house at the far end or up several floors. Only drawback is that each of the adaptors has to be on the same fusebox circuit, so if you wanted to use them to go from the house to an outbuilding which is on a separate consumer unit, it wouldn’t work. You can get cheaper powerline kits which don’t have wireless but instead connect using ethernet cable. Very handy if you are using a desktop machine far away from the router as the connection is more stable and no need to run new cabling. A pair of TP-Link 500Mbps adaptors cost £39.99 from Maplin presently.

Yet another option that might work out cheaper than buying a new router is to include a Network Range Extender in to the network. This boosts signal to hard to reach areas and is cheaper than buying a new router, and easier to configure if your ISP won’t give you the username & password to put into a third party router.

I am with SKY and have one of their Sagem Wireless-N routers and have no problems at all with signal even at the end of the garden through closed doors/windows or 50m or so away across the green outside the front of the house!!!! Previously I was bridging via a short ethernet cable, a Netgear WP2000 cable router to the old G spec SKY router to get a decent signal (literally just disabled the wireless in the SKY router & enabled it on the Netgear router).

*** EDIT *** Just seen the date Mike posted this after I had typed all that out, but it may still help someone!!!!!!

[TF_Mike Herrington]

Cheers Darren.

They were also with Sky, set up with a Sagem Router. I got them a Cisco Linksys ADSL Router and instead of having it set up in a little room somewhere, I put it in the hall (which is the middle of the house) to aim to improve range. I think their old router was about 3 years ol.

Sky wouldn’t give me password, but i read that if you typed something into your browser with your Sagem serial number, you could get your sky internet details. and it worked. 🙂

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