[mikew_nt]

I've been googling this for over a month now, and can't find anything posted on this.

I'm considering upgrading to a new router because I need very, very stable performance and uptime in a fairly crowded neighborhood airspace.

I'm currently running a TPLINK 841ND, and it's just OK.

My situation is that over the last 5 years, all of the routers I've used at different times in my house (two Linksys and this TPLink) all get locked up and have to be power reset, usually about once a week. This is a hassle because I rely on the router operating, esp for work web conferences I need to lead.

In doing a site survey, there are 29 wireless networks I can see from my house, many at power levels comparable to most of my devices in my house. There are no "free" channels in the 2.4ghz range, and there is no chance of getting my neighbors to coordinate on assigning channels or tuning power.

Neighbors are reporting a similar need to reset weekly, and we have a WIDE range of both routers and service providers in our neighborhood, and the only common denominator is the airspace density.

I have to support B and G devices in the house, so going exclusively 5ghz isn't an option. And even if I could put some things on 5ghz, I'm more concerned about the router going down will take down everything anyway.

I've seen anecdotal indication that airwave dominance from other networks may be locking out my wireless devices (I can still get to the router via wired for a short time), and then eventually drives the router nuts and it locks up.

I'm not currently envisioning doing WDS or placing additional access points, so I'm looking for a router with good range and antennas.

We don't have any need to do super high speed wireless transfers between computers, and my cable connection only maxes at 30mbs anyway.

Do you guys have any recommendations on a very resiliant router that does well in a airspace situation I have?

Or is my analysis totally off on this?

[buddee]

There isn't any router which will improve this situation, if you have neighboring wifi interference then its there and buying a new router isn't going to change that, best thing for you would be to jump on the 5Ghz band, but as you say that isn't an option for you then you are pretty limited on what you can do here. Not to mention, even if you did go with 5Ghz band, by design 5Ghz is very limited on range so unless you plan on using it in close quarters, you have no options here.

[mikew_nt]

Thanks for the reply.

I figured I'd have to put up with getting airwave congestion, but I had hoped there would be some more resiliant routers out there that wouldn't fall over and lock up.

It's really more the router locking up that concerns me honestly. Even web conferencing will just buffer me for a bit, or drop me out, but when the router locks up, that kills my web conf until I can get the router rebooted and back up.

Does everyone who lives in a neighborhood like mine experience router lock ups that require power reboots this often?

[buddee]

I live in a very congested area, but when i have wifi interference, it doesn't lock up my router, just slows my wireless to a crawl, i can however still access the router fine with my wired clients.

[mikew_nt]

What router are you using?

I would have thought somebody would have said by now "oh, TPLinks won't stay up nearly as well as will (insert vendor and model here)".

In my neighborhood it is a foregone conclusion that you will train your spouse and kids on how to reset your wireless router when it locks up at least once a week.

Maybe aliens might be using a nearby field for landings and experiments, and that's why we have the issues we do.

Or maybe everyone just takes resetting their router weekly as just normal. I've seen enough comments like that via Google, though I've seen a lot of comments the other way saying they've never reset "in over two years".

Any of the highly recommended routers like the ASUS RT-N16 more resiliant to congestion?

[buddee]

As the pic shows at the top, atleast for that pic, i'm using a WRT400N with build 15704.

And atleast for me, my RT-N16 doesn't block out the noise of the neighboring wifi's around me, because it seems to be what you keep getting at is the theory that if you get a strong enough radio signal router, that the neighboring wifi will not affect you as much, well in my testing that is far from the truth and just the opposite, the more powerful signal router i use, the more interference impedes my performance, because with the more powerful signal, i can see many more AP's for interference to occur. I test with all kinds of routers.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=84084

I even tested with more than what is in that link posting, just didn't see much difference enough to warrant me adding them to the list. But who knows, for you it may work different, i am only offering what i have found in my testing, my main router i use now is a pair of buffalo wzr-hp-g300nh and wzr-hp-ag300h, which seems to smoke everything i have here signal wise, the combo produces for me the best results with little interference (but yes the interference is still there and still affects me). If i was to suggest a strong signal unit to you, i would say the wzr-hp-g300nh v1 has the most power signal wise for a consumer router that i have in my fleet currently. I also have a Netgear WNDR4500 which is very powerful all the way around, but doesn't have dd-wrt support yet.

[mikew_nt]

Interesting.

I never believed the theory I'd heard of pump up your level to drown out the other stuff. Unless of course there is some sort of intelligent thresholding that the radios do in better routers. Which is sort of what I was getting at. I certainly don't know enough to know what sort of tuning can be done on the radio side, but I do know as I'm currently set up my signal levels from some of my devices is as low or lower than my neighbor's networks, so it's not like I could threshold tune if any capability existed.

I was also curious if some routers shed "not my traffic" more efficiently than others. As I had mentioned, my neighbors and I can live with getting slow downs, what we have not been able to handle (nor can I find a good explanation for) is why our various routers will consistenly lock up within a week or two and need rebooting.

Odd.

Would love to hear from any radio experts that might have insight on if you can tune the radios to reject lower level signals. Maybe then if I deployed an extra AP or two, I could get the received signal significantly higher than my neighbor's routers, tune my radios, and I'd get more stability.

Still curious and looking for a workable solution. I'd probably have pulled wire by now except the boys don't have ethernet jacks on half their portable games