why supply such a naff router?

Been up a mates place this afternoon who is on plusnet FTTC service, He been having problems with speed, so we did a check using his wired network computer and got a pretty decent speed, but wireless was a different matter. it was only by mucking around with the channel on the router that we was able to get a decent speed via wi-fi. From where the router is to where his laptop is, the signal should be pretty good, but it is naff.


i am shocked how bad that router is to be honest, because I have got a old speedtouch 585 ADSL router and it was great, something have certainly gone wrong with the speedtouch brand.

Plusnet, sort your routers out, because if i did not happen to go to my mates place this afternoon, you would have had a very unhappy person sending you a email.


I know he have had problems with Plusnet speed in the past, FTTc, getting about 20Mb/s if he was lucky and that was the Fault of plusnet, but this time it was certainly that naff router.

Surely mucking around with the channel is part of the set up procedure to ensure that you are not in conflict with other WiFi networks.
As the router and laptop are close together use a ethernet cable as a matter of course so that you can maximise the speed

In reply to a post by DRW:

Surely mucking around with the channel is part of the set up procedure to ensure that you are not in conflict with other WiFi networks.

Clearly punters who buy broadband from a mass market provider advertising via a Yorkshireman serving smoothies on the TV are all going to be running a channel sweep then manually configuring the router to use the least congested one as a matter of course.

Or perhaps they, quite rightly, expect it to just work.

Which is true, but applies to all routers from all ISPs. Despite the BT Retail hype about the Home Hub.

ISP supplied routers seem to gravitate to channel 1 regardless of interference, the odd one may make a brave foray to channel 6. In very isolated cases a relatively smart one may bimble to channel 11.

It's pretty poor actually. It can't be that tough for a router to do a quick sweep of the spectrum on start up to find and in turn try and avoid interfering networks.

For kit with multiple spatial streams I'm not sure why they couldn't periodically take a stream out of use, during a low bandwidth usage period, and use it to run a quick sweep of the 2.4GHz spectrum to find interfering networks and then jump away from them.

In the interim I'll continue to use channel 13 for everything 2.4GHz.

Using channel 13 may actually be worse than using 11. On 13 you get interference from channel 11 and packets will collide. Using 11 would mean both routers can see one another and will be able to stop collisions by only transmitting when the other one isn't kind of thing. By using 13 they will keep colliding, resending, colliding etc. It ends up highly inefficient.

This is why ISP routers choose 1, 6 or 11 as these are the non-overlapping channels.

All WiFi radios should be able to see channel 13 even if they don't permit it to be used. The radios themselves are worldwide kit, the locks to channels 1-11 / 1-13 / 1-14 are implemented in software.

The radios should see PLCP messages just fine. Worst case they should use ED to avoid collision.

In reply to a post by DRW:

Surely mucking around with the channel is part of the set up procedure to ensure that you are not in conflict with other WiFi networks.

A lot of people would have no idea how to, anyway it was on Auto originally and plusnet told the user to set it to 1. I got a app on my phone which gives a reading of the best channel to use and in this case it was correct.




As the router and laptop are close together use a ethernet cable as a matter of course so that you can maximise the speed


What gave you the idea that they are close together? the router is in the sitting room, laptop is in the dining room. there is desktop computer in the sitting room which is connected directly to the router.

It would be interesting to know how much PN pay for these routers. A while back the magazine PCPro did a review of ISP supplied routers (unfortunately not including PN!) and declared them all to be of fairly poor quality.

I am currently using a 585 as the later supplied one just did not like Android phones however hard I tried.

If PN can buy in bulk perhaps they could offer a quality router at a suitably discounted price and a small profit to themselves. I would be first in the queue!

Meldrew

Hi zyborg47

Sorry to hear you're not too happy with the TG582n. Where as I'd agree no one would expect having to change wireless channels it is sometimes necessary to get the best WiFi performance from a router.

If there's any other feedback you might have for us about this feel free to drop me a reply or a PM with the specifics and I'll be happy to feed that back to the right people for you.

Adam