I have a lot of wireless devices. Our Tivo, Apple TV, PS3, Wii and XBOX all connected wirelessly. This is in addition to my wife's laptop, our phones and the kid's PC. All told, there is a lot of wireless traffic flying around the Hetzel residence. I had been using an Apple Time Capsule which has a Wireless N router included in it, but I don't think that Apple designed it to have that many devices connected at once. As a result, all wireless traffic was very, very slow. Poor Trudy was pulling her hair out every time she was online (which is all the time). If you see a bald lady muttering about 17 more days know that the balding is partially my fault for not fixing the speed problem sooner :)
Because the Time Capsule was soooo slooooow, I decided to pick up a Linksys WRT601N. In addition to the Gigabit switch, it has two, simultaneous N radio bands and was essentially billed as exactly what I wanted. I'm happy to report that this router absolutely SCREAMS in terms of speed. I'm very happy with it. I can now watch HD streaming video on my phone while my wife works, my son plays WoW and my daughter plays the Wii. Everything moves at a much increased clip. Even Apple TV is much, much faster.
However, getting to this state of wireless bliss was a rough road.
When I was at Best Buy yesterday, I saw that they had marked down the model I wanted from $200 to $169. There was also an open box item they were selling for $149. I decided to take a chance on the open box item assuming (as the representative assured me) that the return was simply due to the previous owner not knowing how to set it up. Well, I've set up plenty of routers so I figured it worth the shot. I got home, cracked open the box and followed the "LELA" instructions to the letter. Once the configuration was complete, the software informed me that the router could not detect an internet connection (this despite the face that I could see the cable modem and router lights blinking in unison when they were connected.)
I tried looping the Internet port to one of the input ports and checking to see if the router was picking up an IP. It was (127.0.0.1). I tried configuring it many different ways and it simply would not talk to the cable modem and pick up the IP address from COX. Frustrated, I decided it must be a hardware issue and returned to Best Buy. There I haggled with the employees and explained that I should not have to pay the extra $20 (the cost for a new router vs. the open box one I bought) for the privilege of doing their testing job for them. Eventually they relented and let me grab a new version of the same model for the mark down price.
I rushed back home, plugged it all in again and got the same result. Ugh. Now the troubleshooting began in earnest. I searched and found this linkwhich told me that I had to use MAC cloning in order to use the router. The instructions said that I had to use the MAC address of my PC, but that made no sense since it's the MAC address of the cable modem that should be cloned. I followed the instructions using the MAC of the cable modem and still no joy. I even tried the MAC of my machine just for fun and of course it didn't work. Frustrated, I engaged Linksys support. They were friendly and helpful, but they too seemed to be taking stabs in the dark. I tried each of their suggestions to no avail and while waiting for their responses, I searched the internet and found that a lot of people were suffering the same issues as me and not getting anywhere...even with Linksys support.
Hence the purpose of this post.
I decided I would try one more stab in the dark before giving up and returning the router to Best Buy. I stole the MAC address of my previous router, and entered it in the configuration screen for MAC Cloning on the WRT610N's web config interface. Suddenly everything worked peachy. Don't ask me how using a MAC address of a device that isn't even on the network counts as "cloning", but it did and now we're good. Of course I still have some hurdles to overcome. I want to hook the Time Capsule up to the existing network so I can at least use it as a disk for Time Machine. But for now (and since I use JungleDisk), I'm quite pleased with speed boost. The speed is worth the money, but Linksys really needs to work on the configuration of the router...it's buggy as heck.