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[itxaka]

So my wifi adsl 2 router died yesterday and I went to buy another one.

The thing works normally but there is a strange issue going on. When downloading a game from steam the connection stops for a few seconds (from 5s to 40s randomly) with no visible issue. Link and power are excellent (router is pretty close), the other 2 pc at home has no problems at all.
The link does not fail or anything it just won't do anything at all. Meanwhile the other computers can access internet with no issues.

This behavior seems to stop if I use a cable, bu the PC is really far as to have a cable all the time.

I have tested every channel, every mode (B/G/N), WAP and WAP2, different transmit powers, updating drivers and all.

So my only deduction is that is an issue between the card (atheros 5050g) and the router( D-link DSL-3680).

So, seeing that it's my first time having this kind of problem, can someone shed some light on this? I been googling it but I can find almost no cases of card<->router incompatibility.

any other ideas?

P.S.: I also thought that maybe the router wasn't able to cope with the bandwidth as I get around 1.8Mb from steam and the thing maybe hanged up, but the other computers get the same speed and never go down.

 

[clav]

Home network support GAF reporting in.

Yes, you are right in your deduction as certain cards do not like certain routers and vice versa. I had an Aetheros card that wouldn't communicate to a router if a computer's memory was over 2GB. No driver would fix it and even if the RAM were under 2GB, it would not connect on startup and sometimes BSOD'ing the computer.

I've had cards that just simply won't connect to routers (usually non-broadcom based) ones no matter how hard you tried.

I suggest you keep your modem and routers separate, so that way, if one goes down, the other stays up although most ADSL2 modems sold these days don't support a true bridge mode.

Avoid the Motorola ADSL2 modems. Went through two of them, and they die within an year as the casing is really poorly designed for ventilation.

Can you access your router's local address (i.e. 192.168.1.1) when the connection freezes?

 

[Solaros]

Sounds like you did all the troubleshooting work.

Something you can try is a constant ping to see if the computer drops any packets while doing a steam transfer. The transfer might stop, but if the pings keep going then the network connection is fine. You should be seeing the ping start to drop packets though if it is the bandwidth of the card or the card/router is not a good combo (rare, but possible I would think).

On windows it would be: ping -t steam.com

Press ctrl+c to stop the ping and get some stats.

Try another wireless card and see what happens if the pings drop during a Steam download.

 

[itxaka]

Home network support GAF reporting in.

Yes, you are right in your deduction as certain cards do not like certain routers and vice versa. I had an Aetheros card that wouldn't communicate to a router if a computer's memory was over 2GB. No driver would fix it and even if the RAM were under 2GB, it would not connect on startup and sometimes BSOD'ing the computer.

I've had cards that just simply won't connect to routers (usually non-broadcom based) ones no matter how hard you tried.

I suggest you keep your modem and routers separate, so that way, if one goes down, the other stays up although most ADSL2 modems sold these days don't support a true bridge mode.

Avoid the Motorola ADSL2 modems. Went through two of them, and they die within an year as the casing is really poorly designed for ventilation.

Can you access your router's local address (i.e. 192.168.1.1) when the connection freezes?

Thanks for the info. I didn't heard this before so it sounded strange to me. And no I can't acces the router address during the cuts.

I'll try to have a look at my old adsl modem to see if I can fix it so I can have both of them, one as router and one as modem (it ligths up, gets adsl, computers can connect to it via eth only!, cannot access the modem config nor internet becasue it's sloooow as hell)

Sounds like you did all the troubleshooting work.

Something you can try is a constant ping to see if the computer drops any packets while doing a steam transfer. The transfer might stop, but if the pings keep going then the network connection is fine. You should be seeing the ping start to drop packets though if it is the bandwidth of the card or the card/router is not a good combo (rare, but possible I would think).

On windows it would be: ping -t steam.com

Press ctrl+c to stop the ping and get some stats.

Try another wireless card and see what happens if the pings drop during a Steam download.

Umm, didn't think about doing a ping actually. I'll do that from all the computers across the house to see if any of them fails. Thanks!


In other news I have found an awesome tool to check the power and noise of wifi signal called Inssider. Looks useful, can't wait to try it!

 

[Imbarkus]

I had a Linksys that would kick all connections for between 10 & 60 seconds whenever my sister-in-law's computer would first connect. Turned out it drpped when she was trying to get an ipv6 address via dhcp. Disbled ipv6 on her laptop and never had the problem again. Weird too since we had desktops around that were set to ipv6 dhcp with no issues.