Wi-Fi issues

I twittered this earlier today, but I thought it could use a quick blog post as well.  I had been having issues with my Netgear 802.11G router over the past week and couldn’t figure it out.  The router was working fine when you were hard wired into it, but once you went wireless, it was very flakey.  Speeds would be decent, but every 5 minutes or so, the laptop or PDA I was using were losing the connection.  I reset the router, installed new firmware, and even tried setting up a separate wireless access point and it worked fine.  I was convinced that I had a faulty wireless radio in the unit, but the strange thing was it had been working fun up until this week.

In a desperate attempt to save my sanity before throwing it out the window, I called Netgear customer support.  I spoke with someone who was very helpful and walked me through some troubleshooting steps.  She asked me the usual questions about other devices that may have come into the area recently, and I couldn’t think of any.  Then she asked about other wireless routers.  I thought back about it and noticed that there was indeed a new router in my neighborhood.  She asked me to change the channel of the router and see how it funtioned from there.

Guess what, it worked!  I couldn’t believe that such a small change could make such a difference!  I loaded up 2 TV streaming services and 2 internet radio streaming services on 4 devices and let it run for 2 hours last night.  Guess what, no drop outs!

A great thanks to Netgear for thier help in what was really a simple issue.  It was great to have someone out there that could help so quickly and readily.