Can someone tell me whats up with my network settings? The last router I had was set to WPA-personal. My new router is set to WPA2-personal. I've deleted all my wireless networks on my Win7 PC and created a new one using WPA2. Now Every few hours my wireless setting on my PC change to WPA and I get disconnected. I have to change them back to WPA2 every time. Whats Up? If it makes any difference the new router is running Tomato. Could the router be advertising WPA and causing my PC to switch?
Could be some settings in Tomato but I don't see them. Looks like I have the same problem on another PC too. I found a web camera that was set to use WPA and it was working fine. Crazy. This is my third router. My Linksys started dropping packets. I bought a D-Link which kept killing my VPN. And now this Netgear with Tomato if flopping encryption. Grrr
On the broad subject I hate Wireless a little bit more every week it seems, it is always doing something stupid to annoy me. At home for example I have a Wireless N Netgear (2.4GHz because I am cheap) router that gets really bad performance on my laptop unless I turn on Intel MyWifi. All this does is make my laptop basically a bridge but with it off my ping is 40ms+ to my router, on it is 1ms. If I leave it off and do a line test at pingtest.net the jitter on the line comes back at a crazy level. At first I called my ISP to complain about the line but they said there was nothing wrong it. Plugged it in wired which is when I realised it must be wireless perfomance as the jitter came back at 0!. My PS3 hates it, same room but it is stupidly slow at downloading anything on wireless, wired it works great. Its a new 320GB PS3 slim so it should have at least a semi decent card. However my android phone, wife's iPhone and my 3DS 'SEEM' to work fine on wifi. Think I will just wait for Wireless 802.11ac stuff to appear and make the jump to 5GHz, get a USB3 adapter for my laptop if I have to. On your problem I have never seen a PC switch to WPA on its own before. I have seen PC's where you have to use the manufacturers wireless utility to connect to a WPA2 network because it won't work via the windows utility.
Agreed. Wireless sucks, and consumer grade wireless routers are horrid. There are no good ones, just varying degrees of badness. Also, I haven't had any good experiences with wireless N routers. The ones I've used were far worse than G routers in terms of range and signal strength. They could go the length of a room and that was about it. Totally unsuitable for any kind of decent sized house or office. Every time I've gotten an N router for someone, it's always ended up getting returned because the range was so crappy. The crazy thing is that I thought N was supposed to improve range, but in my experience it's been the exact opposite.
The best and most consistent wireless N router I have personally used is the Vigor 2820n but I don't fancy spending £200 on a router for home. It gives you the option to have 4 different SSIDs and the speed over it is very consistent when transferring files etc. http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?q=vigor+2820n&rls=com.microsoft:en-GB:%7Breferrer:source%3F%7D&oe=UTF-8&rlz=1I7GGLL_en&um=1&hl=en&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=909&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=15622493597547582470&sa=X&ei=eJ9LT86ZOaah0QWCpa2SDg&ved=0CG8Q8wIwAQ Think it may have been superseded by the 2920n which supports VDSL2 but I haven't used it so can't say what it is like. I refuse to use Linksys these days as the range on them never seems to be better than a few feet and netgear stuff seems to need rebooting every couple of days. EDIT: That is another thing, bfun does your router or tomato have an option for mixed mode WPA+WPA2?
I wish I knew more about networking, it sounds like really useful stuff. I have an Asus N router that I know I can do a WHOLE lot more with than I'm doin... I can't even get it out of AP (Access Point I'm assuming) mode... something about my ISP having to matrix their modems or something but when I call them they blame asus so I'm stuck in AP where my network isn't even encripted. Thank god I live in a country town :x I think the range is quite good. I can Skype from down the edge of my driveway and my router is at the back of my house!! I couldn't do that with my 802.11g netgear
You need to set your modem to bridge the connection so it just acts as a modem and not a router/modem.
I think it does have mixed mode but I haven't found those setting yet. I might switch everything back to WPA. It's possible my USB wifi adapter can't handle WPA2 very well. I've also noticed some weird lag in online games that aren't related to response times.
Have you tried flashing DD-WRT? I had a lot of bizarre issues like this when I used Tomato on my Buffalo G router that mysteriously vanished when I changed firmware. http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index
It could be congestion on the channel you use. The larger the range the more noise you might get from neighbors. I think 6 is default for most routers. You might want to switch to 11 or something. My last router would scan the channels for the best one.
I didn't even flash to Tomato. Amazon sells a few routers that are already flashed. This one also came in the DD-WRT flavor but I went tomato in case I wanted VPN.
It's not hard to switch. Download the bin file and upload it in the firmware section of tomato. You need to be on a wired connection. DD-WRT has VPN. Tomato has a cleaner interface, but DD-WRT is more stable in my experience.
I don't think WPA2 works on Tomato. My settings never reverted like yours, but the router would drop everything ever few hours, and the the PC's would reconnect and work as if nothing happened. It sucked if you were streaming something while the disconnect happened though. I changed my setting to MAC filtering without any security, and it's worked fine on Tomato. This was Tomato 1.24, if I remember right.
MAC filtering is a good idea but if you have a lot of devices it's a bit of a pain and it still doesn't stop someone from sniffing your network.
Hmm, I got a Netgear WNDR3700 router and it has worked beautifully for me. It wasn't cheap at $150, but you pretty much get what you pay for. It also has simultaneous dual band. The thing is downstairs and my laptops pick up the signal just fine on 2.4GHz and 5GHz. But my tablet and phone have underpowered wifi radios so the signal is very low on 5GHz. Other than that, I stream HD video to my laptop just fine. No complaints.
Do you get free WiFi routers when you sign up with an ISP in the US or are you expected to buy your own? Over here they all give out free ones (usually netgear basic models) which probably doesn't help perceptions of WiFi here. The only reason I ask is that I remember someone looking for a cable modem before whereas our cable company gives you the modem, infact your not allowed to plug something other than what they give you into their network. I believe now it is an all in one cable modem/wireless router whereas before they would be separate.
It's more common nowadays, but I'm not sure all markets are doing this yet in the US. It doesn't seem consistent. I know ATT does it with their U-verse service. The thing sucks. It's a wireless gateway stuck on 802.11g. I just connect my router to it and turn off the wireless on the gateway.