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My connection at home to broadband works for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and then will drop for 30 seconds to a minute and come back on.
If anyone can give me any suggestions I would really appreciate it. Spent hours last night and still got problems. I looked at this approx 12 months ago and gave up in the end.
The reason its important to me is that I play a lot of online poker so a 30 second drop in connection can be costly£ - if it was just for browsing the internet I wouldnt be that bothered.
Here goes anyway:-
I have an Acer laptop with internal wireless card - I connect wirelessly at work no problem at all and it NEVER drops the connection. When I view available wireless connections it does only show the one in our office.
I'll just list out things ive tried and things that might be relevant :-
If I connect wired the connection NEVER drops.
I am now onto my third wireless router at home - new one bought yesterday is a netgear WGT624 (previous ones have been Belkin and prior to that Sweex) and the same thing has happened on them all.
Therefore I would think I can eliminate the router being the problem.
I am running windows XP home edition.
At home when I view available connections it shows 5 or 6 neighbours.
Ive set it up with security encryption.
When I try to update the netgear firmware from the router configuration page it says its up to date.
Ive changed channels, default was 11, ive tried various others including 1,2 and 6.
Signal strength always says excellent
Ive turned off Digital cordless phones and microwave just in case.
One thing I have just noticed is that the speed at work seems to stay consistant at 11.0 Mbps but at home were i have the problem the speed changes all the time. This might be something? I'd not notice until this a.m that it stays constant at work !
Ive tried turning off Firewall and made no difference.
Ive tried turning off Qos which is something I read somewhere to try.
Tried disabling power management on the wireless card.
Tried turning off wireless zero configuration.
Change your wireless channel too, on the router and on the network adapter.
Get yourself "network stumbler" to scan the channels of the other networks in your area. And change your setup to a channel which nobody else has and is as far from others as possible. E.G if there was a channel 11 and 6 in your area try 3. Your channel should range both ways about by about 3.
Try moving your router about to increase the signal QUALITY.
New driver for the wirless card is 1st on the list, you could also try setting the wireless mode to just 'b' or 'g' to see if it improves.
I would suggest dropping the encryption to WEP at home and gradually change to a more secure WPA providing your happy that the previous settings are better and it is supported.
Also consider where the router is placed, higher up the better and where you are connecting from in the house. I can fiind that sitting behind a wall at 90deg to the router is terrible move to a different position and it's great.
In the advanced settings there may be one called beacon interval, you could try decreasing (take note of the original value 1st though) this value from eg 100 to 90, this will make the connection poll more frequently. I had to reduce this to 50 on a Linksys to keep a connection alive for a Playstation.
gd luck
sc00bie
Wireless networking is a specialist field in its own right simply because it can be a pain in the ****. I would suggest the reason that it works flawlessley at work is because they had a site survey done and have placed all the access points in optimal positions, there are also more than likely substantially better quality than Belkin.
My home wireless network is a weird one in that I have a Linksys router upstairs and a pc with a Linksys card on the same floor. The signal is constantly crap (2Mbps - 18Mbps). Whereas my PC downstairs has a Cisco Wireless card and is presently sitting at 54Mbps.
Just a thank you for all you replies and suggestions.
I tried changing channels and no difference but I have just downloaded driver update
for my intel 2200bg wireless card. So far so good!!
Hopefully it was the driver that was the problem - i didnt consider this would be the problem with it working ok at work but maybe it just didnt like the routers ive had at home. Perhaps a compatibility issue.
Anyway, thanks again & i'll post if it stays connected ok tonight
SJ
At the moment its staying constant on 54.0 Mbps and has been working ok for 20 minutes- no dropped connections yet.
Well my laptop stayed connected last night for 2 hours and then just before I was about to turn off the connection dropped for approx 30 seconds and then came back on.
The driver update for my wireless card has certainly done something as I would never had 2 hours without it dropping before.
Turned on this am at work and all is fine still so I'll just have to see how it goes at home tonight.
I did download the netstumbler program and it showed that I had 2 neighbours on channel 11 and 2 on channel 6
Ive put mine to channel 2 so not sure if ths is right or wrong?
Last night at home my connection stayed on without dropping the connection for 3 hours !
This would never have happened before I updated that wireless card Driver so hopefully that was the problem.
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