onsdag 3 augusti 2005

Wireless Wrestling, Part III

My third venture in my quest for wireless happyness is the Linksys WRT54GS router and WUSB54GP adapter. The router’s appearance has a disturbing similarity to a toy, rather than a piece of professional networking equipment. A striking feature is the second antenna, which is probably not a bad idea. A CD accompanies the router, containing a setup wizard.



Before I ran it, I made sure to change my computers’ subnet to match the default router address of 192.168.1.1. I noticed that I immediately had wired connectivity, and so did the setup wizard which urged me to continue configuration using the web interface. Just like previously reviewed routers, the Linksys has a built-in DNS server which is very comfortable. After punching in the router’s address in my browser, I got a clean yet full-featured interface to control the router.




It seems to have more wireless settings than the other routers that I have tried. The firmware was about seven months old so I made sure to upgrade it immediately — easily done via the web interface. Unfortunately, only ten ports can be forwarded and I’ve already filled six of the slots. There was also an issue with WPA encryption that I could not resolve, so I reverted to WEP for the time being. There are alternative open source firmware editions available for this router that supposedly offer more features. Like the official firmware, they are based on Linux. However, I have yet to try any of them.
The next step was installing the adapter in my laptop. That, too, involved running a setup wizard. It was quick and painless, but for some reason it failed to detect my internet connection after setup had been completed. I did have flawless internet connectivity nonetheless. This mysterious phenomenon, though not a problem, has been recurring occasionally.
Performance, in terms of throughput, seems reasonable. TPTEST reports that I get almost the full 10 Mbps of my internet connection. The neglible difference is probably not due to the router. An FTP connection between my wired computers’ 100 Mbit network interface cards reaches 85 Mbps, and a wireless FTP transfer from my server to my laptop was spinning in 20.8 Mbps. That does not come close to the advertised 54 Mbps, but that seems to apply to wireless equipment from other manufacturers as well. It is certainly fast enough for most needs — including the streaming of movies or music.
This router seems more stable than the ones by D-Link and Netgear that I previously tested. However, I do occasionally (rarely) lose internet connectivity for a brief moment, as witnessed by automated reconnect attempts to IRC servers by my server. Because the router provides rather poor logging facilities, it is hard to ascertain at this time whether this this is a result of router instability or the internet connection itself going down. I plan on carrying out some further investigation on this topic eventually. For the time being, having used the router for a few weeks now, I’m fairly pleased with my purchase. Third time’s the charm, eh?