Wireless Routers for Congested Areas?

An anonymous reader asks: "I have been living close to campus at UW Madison for the past six months or so and have come across a problem. We, along with everyone else in the area, have a wireless router, both a Belkin 54g and a Linksys WRT54G. We have Charter 3 Mbit down/.25 Mbit up cable and 6 guys in our apartment. Just on our block about 15-20 people have routers. We are constantly plagued with problems connecting to the wireless, staying connected, getting connected after rebooting, hibernating, and so forth. We have to reset the cable modem and the router many times a day to get everything rolling again. I am thinking that the router is the problem, because my dad always told me that's why they have twenty dollar routers up to thirty thousand dollar routers. What router can I purchase that will help my situation and will work well in a congested college area?"

Comments

A wired one

[Ernesto Alvarez]

If your problem is really with the wireless lan, I think the answer is simple:

QUIT USING 802.11 AND GET A WIRED LAN.

If your computer room is anything like mine, it is completely immobile, and a wireless lan is the wrong tool for the job.

You shouldn't use a technology just for its sake. You should use the right tool for the right job. Using a wireless network when everybody does too is like using a hub with everyone in your neighbourhood connected to it. In fact, wireless lans have serious trouble operating under such circumstances (its throughput is proportional to the thoughput of the slowest station, because the slowest ones turns into a (physical) bandwidth hog).

Get your stationary machines off the air, at least you won't have to endure that problem on desktops. If you can, get your neighbours to do the same. Leave only the mobile machines on wireless. Even if you can't convince anyone, at least your problem will be only on your mobile hosts.

By the way, you might want to check if that's really all of your problems, WRT54G are known to have problems under high loads (like constant bittorrent traffic). It tries to track too many connections until it runs out of table space and then nothing can get to it (or through it). The symptoms match, when I do that to mine, I have to reset it once every two or three days.

Forget wireless...

[gweihir]

... ans use old-fashioned cables. They work far better anyways. Faster, much more reliable and insensitive to other signals. Your problem is most likely interference with other routers. Since there is only a very limited number of channels, you will not get a good signal in your environment. The only other option I can think of is to use RF-shileding on all the outside walls of your apartment. Byt that would be a lot of effort and cost a lot of money in addition. Cables are cheap.

Just disable the wireless output of your router and use the switeched output(s) instead. If there is only one, get an 8 port 100MBps swicth. You can chain switches if needed.