Rebooting your router clears up 90% of router/internet issues. And none of that soft reboot stuff - yank the power cord for 30 seconds, and plug it back in.

And, why change your wireless channel? Just go over to your neighbors house with a bat, and destroy their router.

shockwaver

I've had a ton of trouble with two Time Capsules I've bought for two different locations. They would regularly loose internet connectivity, lan connectivity was fine. Rebooting them fixed the problem for about an hour. The thing that fixed my issue was changing my DNS servers to openDNS [www.opendns.com]

gardenlevel

'And, why change your wireless channel? Just go over to your neighbors house with a bat, and destroy their router.'
But what if their internet is slow :)
(The answer of course is to destroy one and then both use the other. Cheaper, and just as good :>)

Also, my router is a bt homehub. It's awful, the settings don't work, and port-forwarding for (100% legal <_<) torrents took a week of tinkering. it was routing to my DS at one point. wtf?

Phoshi

I've recently had a network performance problem at home. I rebooted the router but that did not help. The solution was to reboot the Comcast-provided modem. We get phone service through Comcast too so it is one of those beefy modems which contain batteries in case of power failure. To do a cold-boot, you have to unplug the modem *and* remove the batteries, wait a bit, put everything back together and bingo!

lemur

connect both your router and dsl/cable modem to a power bar. once a week, just switch off the power bar, wait 30 seconds, then power on again. Both devices reset at the same time.

pizzaandgelato

buy a WRT54GL flash with DD-WRT and replace antennas.

job done.

gamer91

My linksys router had been running slow after getting matching blue linksys comcast modem to sit under it. Reboot always helped for awhile but would eventually slow down. Then it dawned on me how warm they were getting. I went out and spent 5 buck on a 5 inch tall fan to sit in front of em blowing air across em. Networks been running smooth and fast ever since. Knock on wood.

hypnotoad1971

Here's an odd tip I learned.

If your wireless network occasionally just drops out completely and perhaps you hear a phone ringing in the distance, you might have a neighbor with an old 2.4GHz cordless phone.

The solution is to look at what other networks are out there and change your channel to the same as the others. This works because the phone will automatically fall into the least used channel, so if you share a channel with someone else it is less likely to be disrupted.

sir_eccles

Funny, I was just having throughput problems this weekend, but not with the wireless, but the wired side. I have a WRT54GL and use DD-WRT, and I have no idea where to start. I can't even find a good app to test my throughput speed (which should be 100M on the wired side). Who knows, maybe by wireless is hosed also, but I use it less than my wired connections.

glycolized

what is a good channel? My neighborhood is very busy with wireless signals and I am sure that I am picking up interference.

gpzbc

A lot of users can also be a cause of a slow network, up at my college the routers get easily overloaded and you have to get a new IP address, this can take a lot of time when there are a few thousand people trying to access the web,only about 45 on a subnet.

daybringer

@gpzbc: The only non-overlapping channels for b/g are 1, 6, and 11. Channels 2-5 overlap with 1 and 6 to some degree. Channels 7-10 overlap with 6 and 11 to some degree.

Also, don't forget that standard 100Mbps ethernet (the kind in your router and in every computer that isn't ancient) is roughly five times faster than 54Mbps wifi. What? 100 isn't around five times 54? I wonder which number is a huge marketing lie...

nighttimestereo

Thanks! I am on Channel 4. I'm going to change it right now.

gpzbc

I also HIGHLY RECOMMEND changing your DNS servers to openDNS at the router level. Every router I touch (family, friends, and customer's) I make this change - everyone has been much happier.

mobilejray

A LOT of wireless access points suffer from problems due to badly written firmware and issues with cheap chips. A typical problem is you fire up your PC, it can see a strong signal for your SSID, appears to connect, but fails to pick up an IP address via DHCP. Generally if you reboot the router it will work. I've seen this on Linksys, D-Link and ActionTec access points/routers/gateways.

Some problems which can be fixed by rebooting the router can be fixed permanently by changing the firmware. This could be an update from the manufacturers site, but in my experience the manufacturers of cheap wifi access points are in a state of denial about this and haven't fixed the problem.

Definitely worth checking out the alternative firmwares out there - see the Wikipedia page for DD-WRT for a list of others - [en.wikipedia.org] For Linksys, I had a good result using Neptune354 for my Linksys home gateway - [cyberstorm.altervista.org]

Adding a larger antenna can improve reception, but might also interfere with your neighbours WiFi - I like the suggestion to share a connection as a happy compromise.

DunxD