Router Debacle

This post is a tech rant, so don't feel forced to read the whole thing.

Our ISP constantly has horrible service, but more of that in a later post. After suffering through 100kb/s (slightly better than an old-school modem) bandwidth from October through December, they finally fixed the problem right before Christmas. It was beautiful to have nearly 1Mb/s service. We went from the internet unpaved roads to internet county-maintained striped roads.

Things were great for a couple of weeks until DNS name look-ups stopped working, well actually taking 90s to resolve, which is about the same as not working. This was really aggravating. You could surf, but just barely. My VPN worked great, so I knew that DNS was the problem. After a week of complaints, I finally decided to dig further into the problem. After a couple of hours, I discovered that our router (Netgear WGR614) was dying after about four years. A firmware upgrade fixed DNS, but then packets started getting dropped. Why can't these things just die? The slow death drives me nuts. This is the third Netgear router that has died an unobvious death.

So, I decided we needed a new router - one that doesn't bear the Netgear name. A few minutes of searching lead me to the Linksys WRT400N. It's a dual-radio 802.11n router. It got decent reviews, and Newegg had a great price.

Three days later ($1.99 3-day shipping), I proceeded with the installation...for two hours. For some reason, the router could not talk to our ISP. Our ISP provides a standard ethernet connection with a static IP, no authentication, no modem. Basically, it's the simplest possible connection. Linksys customer service finally decided that I had a defective router. Customer service informed me the next morning that they would not replace it. I would have to go through Newegg. Who doesn't replace (they called it "warranty") a DOA product?

Newegg, however, was quick and easy and provided me with replacement service, including all shipping costs. Newegg is my new personal hero.

After two weeks, I received the replacement. All excited, I quickly hooked it up and...had the same problem. After poking and prodding and searching, I finally found references on the internet to people who had problems getting the router to talk to older ADSL modems. This problem was solved by placing a switch between the router and modem. So, I tried this out, and just like magic the router worked fine. I finally decided that the router could not negotiate a 10Mb/s half-duplex network (provided by our ISP).

So, I called up customer support to find out why not...their customer service was Indian and barely understandable. He suggested such things as upgrading the firmware (no upgrades available) or returning the item for another. I finally hung up on the guy.

Newegg came to the rescue yet again by providing return shipping and a refund. I'm still waiting to see if I get inflicted with their 15% restocking fee.

On Friday I visited the Illini Apple Center and bought an Airport Extreme, which is what I should have done a few weeks ago. It doesn't have any problems talking to our ISP. All of the computers hooked up to the wireless without issue (although, all of our older 802.11b devices, including Nintendo DS) have to use the unsecured guest network because they can't do WPA2 encryption, which is the only encryption available with Airport Extreme. However, it's great to provide an easy, isolated, unsecured guest network. I hope no one drives all the way out here to steal our bandwidth...