Scientific Atlanta -> D-Link: Wireless drop-out...

[slider]

For someone who spends so much time on B3D I'm such a clutz at anything IT related.

Anyway, I've moved to a new country and eventually had internet access arranged. The chaps who fitted it didn't speak any English and we muddled through somehow (I had my mind on a dozen other things at the same time).

When they left I realised I'd been left with a wireless router. Drat. It's a Scientific Atlanta DPC2203. I doubt anyone's familiar with it but there you go.

So, 360 & PS3 in the living room and router & desktop in the den. All is working fine. I check the wired connection with my laptop too and that works great as well.

But still no wireless. So when I have a free afternoon I take a walk to a well renowned component, IT and electronics place. There I pick up a D-Link DIR-300 which sits in between the phonejack and the PC. It's aim is to give wireless access and it does this fine for the first month or so (although, perversely, I have to move both routers across to a doorway to be able to take my consoles online - laptop's fine).

Now the problem. Suddenly my wireless access has gone. I keep getting DNS errors on laptop, desktop and consoles. If I remove the D-Link and go to the original set-up it's all fine and dandy. Obviously an issue with the D-Link.

Any suggestions? I've had a Google around for new firmware and done a hard reset on the D-Link but all to no avail. Sorry for the length of post - I always find detail important*.

*XP on desktop, Vista on laptop.



EDIT: Wrong forum. Another

 

[Davros]

There I pick up a D-Link DIR-300 which sits in between the phonejack and the PC.

it should be : pc --> router --> modem --> phone jack

 

[ShaidarHaran]

I must say after having recently replaced my D-link WBR-1310 with a Linksys WRT54GS v2 my wireless dropout issues have completely disappeared.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

Yeah... a lot of D-Link routers have issues with wireless dropouts, and sometimes, it may have a stable wireless signal, but it will drop the PPPoE connection with the modem and consistently fail to restore it.

BTW, Shaidar's aforementioned WBR-1310 is probably one of the more infamous in this regard. My WBR-2310 was only a little better (a little better still with the later hardware revision, but alas, I have the A1 hardware), but you have to monkey with the settings a bit, and also make sure your wireless card drivers are also up to date and not just the router firmware. The most unusual thing for me was that there was one unexpected tool I could use that would actually keep my wireless connection stable -- Bittorrent. As long as I'm seeding or leeching a torrent, my wireless connection stayed up... and I've found this to be repeatable almost invariably without fail. Granted, there's the downside that the number of open connections at a time with bittorrent means everything else is pretty slow even if I don't use up a lot of actual bandwidth, but at least it wouldn't die on me all the time.

As a general rule, if your D-Link router has any sort of "bonus" features like their so-called "rangebooster" or whatever, I've found that disabling those features helps, but no matter what, any victory is short-lived.

 

[BRiT]

I had to throw out my DLink Wireless DI-624 802.11g Xtreme router. It would drop wireless AND wired connections. No amount of firmware updates, setting adjustments, or additional cooling helped. The problem was immediately fixed by switching to a Linksys WRT54GS (currently running Tomato firmware).

I would go so far as to say: As a general rule, if you have a D-Link router you will have trouble.

 

[slider]

Thanks chaps. The products I can get here are limited so may be stuck with the D-Link for the time being.

I can't replace the original modem either as my cable company fitted it with a bloody hard encasing hence the D-Link solution.

For what it's worth... it's working for the time being.

it should be : pc --> router --> modem --> phone jack

That's what I had originally expected. But with this hard encasing (which I'm wary of cracking open in case it leaves me without internet access) I'm stuck with this set-up. As I said it's working for the time-being. I'll have to online order a Linksys or something.

Cheers.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Have you considered updating it to DD-WRT? Not necessarily a cure-all, but it sometimes works.

I had an old/cheap DLink that was annoying the hell out of me with drops, until a neighbor mentioned they had a bricked Linksys WRT54G if I wanted it. I got it, flashed DD-WRT on to it, and have been insanely happy with it since.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I had to throw out my DLink Wireless DI-624 802.11g Xtreme router. It would drop wireless AND wired connections. No amount of firmware updates, setting adjustments, or additional cooling helped. The problem was immediately fixed by switching to a Linksys WRT54GS (currently running Tomato firmware).

I would go so far as to say: As a general rule, if you have a D-Link router you will have trouble.

Weird I would have said the exact opposite. I've had 2 Linksys routers flake out on me, and my friend has had one flake out on him.

I did just have a Dlink finally die on me after about 5 years though. But that's still 3 years longer than all 3 of those Linksys routers. And while I haven't tried the latest ones, the ones I've had previously have all choked on heavy network loads.

I've heard the DD-WRT firmwares make them fairly reliable under load, but not about to trust Linksys craftsmenship again after 3 hardware failures.

Regards,
SB

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

I've generally had good results with D-Link wired routers, which is kind of why I ever got a D-Link in the first place. In fact, even my WBR-2310, at its flakiest never dropped a wired connection -- it just couldn't really sustain a wireless connection for very long. At its worst, it would drop the wireless connection so frequently that it would need a reset every 2 minutes. But even then, the one PC that had a wired connection would be just fine.

As a general rule, most D-Link routers cannot be updated to ANY available open source firmware either. Sometimes it's a chipset or a memory problem, but whatever it is, there are very few cases where you have the option of installing DD-WRT or OpenWRT or Tomato or anything of the sort on anything made my D-Link. Even otherwise, my past experience with those types of firmware is that it is fine for those cases where the firmware itself is the problem (which is probably often the case with LinkSys), but there's basically no way it can cover for what is essentially crappy hardware.

The general consensus is that all consumer wireless routers suck. There's no two ways about this. You buy one. It fails and then you tell everybody how awful it is, and then you buy one from a different manufacturer... it works smoothly for a few months, and you think it's awesome, but then that fails as well after a year at most, and then you try again with a different brand until that fails and so on. After some point, you'll run out of brands. If you really want a stable wireless router, you won't find it outside of business-class hardware, and that often means spending a good $300 and having to deal with very draconian setup procedures. But if the goal is to not spend through the wazoo, you might actually do a lot better getting a separate wired-only router and a separate wireless access point.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Actually the Wireless on both my old DGL-4300 and newer DIR-655 Dlinks has been pretty solid. The DGL-4300 did have dropouts in my area, but then all wireless-G routers have problems where I am. I live in an apartment tower near downtown, and there's a LOT of wireless traffic here.

The DIR-655 wireless-N has been doing quite well, probably because I'm blasting over anything within X-meters of it. Still I don't usually have it turned on. With the population density here, it's only a matter of time until someone tries to hack it.

I've also had quite positive experiences with Buffalo routers in Japan. Haven't used them in the states however.

Both Linksys and Netgear have been positively horrendous from both a hardware and throughput point of view however. At least for me. It's quite possible I've just been unlucky, but friends in my area have had similar experiences.

But I agree, personal experiences are going to color a persons opinion whether a hardware line is deserving of it or not. For example I still have a few IBM 75GXP's running just peachy in an older box, haven't had a single one die on me. Maxtor and WD on the other hand.

Regards,
SB