Sucessful wireless-N router upgrade

[VirtualLarry]

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Just thought I would provide a small mini-review for the Trendnet 652 Wireless-N router. I installed one today at a friend's house, along with a Linksys 16-port 10/100 switch, replacing a Netgear FVS318 wired router. The old router was very reliable, but not very fast. Comcast increased their cable internet speeds from 6Mbit/sec to 12Mbit/sec (and powerboosting beyond that), and the old FVS318 was limited in LAN-WAN speeds to ~7Mbit/sec. Speedtests gave 5Mbit/sec before the upgrade, now they give 25Mbit/sec (powerboost), or 10Mbit/sec (non-powerboost). I still don't know about the long-term reliability of the 652, I hope it doesn't need to be rebooted often. I also haven't tested it with torrents. It does have a lot of RAM (as far as routers go), and a 400Mhz processor (I think).

I don't have any wireless-N clients to test with, but with a laptop with Wireless-G (broadcom), I got signal throughout the house, and even signal out behind the house. House is old with walls of mixed construction, house was expanded from original layout and size. Previous Netgear wireless router that was located on first floor, barely gave signal on the second floor. Now, with the 652 on the second floor, signal is good both on second floor and first floor. (Showing 54Mbit/sec on first floor, which is pretty good. Out in back yard, getting 18Mbit/sec with one, sometimes two, bars of signal.)

The 652 router is 2x2 MIMO, with two 2dbi detachable antennas.

Overall, the network is now speedy and has good wireless signal. I'm pretty happy. Now when I come over with my laptop, I won't have to fight with the existing wireless, or piggy-back on the neighbor's wireless, which had better signal (still only 5.5Mbit/sec connect speeds, sometimes down to 1Mbit/sec).

Oh, the WLAN light is less than useful. It just blinks on and off in a stable pattern, when WLAN is enabled, and does not indicate traffic.

I will update when I get some data on torrents or online gaming.

Edit: Online gaming is good. Torrents still unknown.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just a followup. There seems to be something screwed up with the DHCP server in this router. When I installed it, I flashed it to 1.10b8, which is the update that adds Static DHCP.

Well, I left things at defaults when I installed it, and everything was fine. Then, one day later, one machine on the LAN here couldn't pull an IP from the router. The switch showed a valid link light, so it wasn't a physical connection problem. So I manually added the MAC address of that machine to the Static DHCP list, and it worked.

Fast-forward a week, and now I'm looking at the DHCP list, and that machine is showing up twice! Once in the static DHCP list, and once in the dynamic DHCP list, with a different IP address! So static DHCP appears to be somewhat broke in this firmware.

Likewise, there are two IPs listed in the dynamic DHCP list, that are outside of the DHCP pool! Like, possibly piggybackers from the neighbors WLAN, windows likes to switch networks depending on signal strength. It's like the DHCP server on the Trendnet just accepted the IP addresses that those devices already had, and is now continuing to serve them, even though they are outside of the pool. WTF.

I installed the update, because I had read somewhere that it fixed some problems for someone, so I figured that it was a good update. Now, I'm not so sure.

Everyone still has connectivity, but it's just a little wacky from my perspective.

Edit: Had another instance of a station not being able to pull an IP address from the router. Physical connectivity is OK. Don't know why this is happening. Added station to Static DHCP list, hopefully it won't happen again.