I moved recently into a much larger house. The problem arose that My little wireless Belkin router that I paid $20 for at Wal-Mart so I could use my Wii didn’t seem up to the task of covering my entire residence. It also started to have issues when more than 4 devices were connected at once.

I moved 2 of my desktop PCs to wireless, as I wasn’t keen on drilling holes in the walls for cat5.  So now I have 2 laptops, 2 desktop PCs, my media center PC,  my iPhone, my Nintendo Wii, and my Nintendo DS all using my wireless connection.  I decided it was time to upgrade routers, so after doing some research I heard that the Linksys WRT54g (and it’s derivatives, the GL and GS) got great reviews. I was going to go for the GL model, since it had more memory and used Open Source Firmware, but just my luck, none of the stores around here carried it.

So, Best Buy wound up having the G and GS models on sale.  I got there and decided to pick up the GS.  I got it home, plugged it in, and set it up. It was great, for about an hour.

Suddenly I started realizing the network was horribly slow.  I had constant packet loss outside the router (the internal network was fine, so it wasn’t a bad signal) . After hours and hours of research, I couldn’t find a solution to my issue.  I could reset the router by unplugging it, but an hour or so later, the problem would crop up again.

One site I visited suggested that perhaps the cache was filling up in the router.  This made sense, but unfortunately there wasn’t a fix for it.  What I wound up doing was installing a 3rd party firmware, DD-WRT.  From there I had different issues, with bad signal, but at least the packet loss issue was resolved.

It’s taken many hours of tweaking and reading on the DD-WRT site to get my router running stable.  My Belkin never had issues like this, I just plugged it in and it worked.    I must confess that I’m not well versed in the wireless networking arts, so some of the issues I have may just be to plain ignorance or stupidity. However, I’m having a hard time believing it could be this blasted difficult.

There’s still some quirks I have to work out. My lovely 15mbit connection  only tops out at 10mbit/sec right now, so that’s kind of a drag.  If I can’t get this blasted thing to work right, I may just wind up returning it and taking a look at something else.  I’m so frustrated right now that I wouldn’t be above wiring my house with cat5.