WGU624 + MA401 = little or no range at all.

I have had an older Netgear MR814 routher for some time, using it in conjunction with a Netgear MA401 card in a Dell Latitude L400 laptop. This has worked fairly well, the range isn't great but it gets me around the house.

I recently bought a refurbished Netgear WGU624 with the idea I would eventually upgrade the card in the laptop so that both could use the G or 108Mbs speeds. I also thought the range might improve. Anyway, as I was away most of the summer I never got to hooking up the new router fro a couple of months. Once I did I had a few difficulties, but eventually got it running and upgraded with the latest firmware. Now, I'm still using my original card in the laptop, so I'm still at

802.11b. The range is abysmal. If I move 20 feet from the router, the signal drops 50%. If I go 1 floor away, I lose it completely. It is in the same location as the old router. So it is unusable for wireless. I hooked the old router back up, my thought being I can at least keep the new one for a hard-wire backup for my home network as I can't return it.

Netgear support will not help me, and that is another, very disappointing story (can you spell "off-shoring"). Suffice it to say I will never buy another Netgear product, and I have always used them, but I can't support companies that do this (I know, pretty soon I won't be able to buy anything). But I digress...

My question is: do you think the problem is the mix of an older card with the newer router, or just a bad router? Is it worth it to get a G card? Has anybody had good luck with this router? Is there any kind of a tweak that might help?

-Jim

Reply to
jtpr
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Jim, first of all B has better range than G. most people dont realize that. Secondly,,, these routers cost $20. just get new linksys and supercharge it yourself.

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Robert Kim

2611 s highway 101 suite 203 cardiff ca 92007
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I have had an older Netgear MR814 routher for some time, using it in
Reply to
robert evdo hsdpa kim

"robert evdo hsdpa kim" hath wroth:

Baloney. For roughly equal speeds, 802.11g has much more receiver sensitivity than the equivalent 802.11b speeds. For example, the DI-624 router has speeds at:

Mbps Type PER dBm Mbs Type PER dBm 54 OFDM 10% -68 11 CCK 8% -82 48 OFDM 10% -68 9 OFDM 10% -87 36 OFDM 10% -75 6 OFDM 10% -88 24 OFDM 10% -79 5.5 CCK 8% -85 18 OFDM 10% -82 2 QPSK 8% -86 12 OFDM 10% -84 1 BPSK 8% -89

There's a 3dB improvement in receive sensitivity for 6Mbits/sec OFDM versus 5.5Mbits/sec 802.11b. That's about a 70% improvement in range. In addition, 802.11g is much less susceptible to reflections and interference problems than 802.11b. Lastly, the 802.11g hardware tends to use later chipsets and designs which are usually (not always) a substantial improvement over previous 802.11b only incantations.

Why do you think the 802.11b had better range?

Yep. Install DD-WRT v23 sp2. Been doing that. The only problem is that the WRT54G/GS really have a not so wonderful radio section. The Linux router section is cool, but I'm not impressed with the RF section (based on very limited testing at home).

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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