I hope you are not working on a Linksys router. You know the story with them don't you. Linksys used to be one of the best routers back in the day, then about 4-5 years ago Cisco bought them out, and they very intentionally weakened and messed up their own routers, and then "offered" the Linksys consumer level, pro-sumer (us) level customers a slightly discounted buy in give back to "upgrade" to the upper level Cisco routers. I kid you not this is the honest truth of what went down. I will never ever by a linksys or Cisco product on principle alone.
What they didn't count on was the growth in other router companys and that many customers (ourselves included) simply jumped ship to other more ethical companies. Imagine actually waterdown your own decent product in an attempt to get you customer base to purchase new product all over again... twice!!! The set of brass
, on those folks.
Anyway, we use a good old NetGear Max Range and it is the best router we have tried and this is number three for us. Until this puppy fails or has issues, I'm sticking with it. Although I was thinking of upgrading to their new dual frequency one. But right now we work just fine and the wireless are not much if any slower for most parts of the office than the 100 speed tower plugged directly into the router just five feet away on ten feet of cable. I'd say that's pretty darn good performance. We just about alway have 54 throughput reading on all of the laptops. And we do have lots of other networks laying around.
Here's s decent tip. B&G 2.4 networks have bleedover on most of the channels so you need to go to one extreme or the other. There really are but three good solid channels, 1, 6 and 11. And for some reason most people seem to go to either extreme side, so we are in the middle here at 6 with almost no other networks working the same channel. That's human nature and Pysch for ya. Anyway, there are devices and programs that can sniff for networks and even tell you what channel they are on, how strong they are, and what type of incription they are running. My new Dell laptop came with such a program on it. And again both at the office as well as at home we are just about the only #6 channel 2.4 network anywhere near us.
So sniff your surroundings or play with some different channels and only use 1, 6 or 11 and see which one works. It can make a really nice difference... Let me know how it all works out.
