Trying a different access point
by Volker Weber
vowe's magic flying circus is Wi-Fi hell. Tons of steel and concrete, aluminum shades, covering multiple floors. I can't do that with a single access point. The hub is a VDSL-capable Fritz!Box 7390, but there are multiple wireless access points all over the place. I used to recommend Netgear, especially the blue steel boxes, but the ones I have are now outdated with 54 MBit 802.11g. They have been replaced with newer black plastic 802.11n Netgears, but I am having some difficulties with them. Devices that don't connect, lose their connection and similar issues. One of the boxes an WNR3500 needs a cold boot once in a while. This neverever happened with the blue gear!
Anyway, Belkin was so smart to send me a sample of their Play Max router. (Hint hint: send me good stuff, and I write about it). They don't make access points. You just dumb down a router to be an access point, just like I did with the aforementioned WNR3500. The Belkin router actually has a setting for that so you don't have to disable the firewall, the router and the DHCP server. Just a checkbox and entry fields for the IP details:
Can you spot what's missing? The default router. You can see that the "router became access point" can't find its own way to the Internet, because it's unable to set its own time from the NTP servers it can't find:
Not a big deal since you never ask the AP for the time. And it does bridge the traffic in the LAN just fine, so all attached devices have no difficulties fetching their configuration data from the DHCP server. There is just one feature where you have to carefully adjust the time. Belkin calls it "Self Healing". You can schedule times when the router will automatically reboot, avoiding the issues that requires me to unplug the WNR3500.
In my case it is set to restart Tuesday night at 3:30 am. Not my time, but its time in 1970. This would be somewhat easier, if the router would actually knows its time better.
On to the good news: the Belkin router serves 802.11n in both the 2.4 GHz and the 5 GHz band at the same time, the latter one being a lot less crowded. The signal readout is -35 dBm, where the WNR3500 never was better than -50 dBm. That should give me some extra range.
There is a ton of features in the router, that I won't be using. Hooking up a print server would require software on the client which I won't install. There is also a media server for attached storage, again something I don't need since Sonos takes care of all my music needs.
Comments
Who else was reminded of this:
Not me.
Hint: Never go shopping when you're hungry ;-)
Netgear apparently stopped making reliable stuff a few years ago. Linksys seems to be the choice nowadays.
I'm looking for a dual range router - so I checked out the amazon reviews on this. Uhh - wow. I don't know if I have ever seen something so trashed on Amazon. I think I will wait on this one.
Amazon Review
