Dell 1450 WLAN (a.k.a. Broadcom) and linksys wireless routers

So I think I mentioned that I upgraded the firmware on my Linksys router and that this improved the performance of my connection somewhat but that my connection continued to be super-unreliable. I was still consistently getting between 75% and 100% packet loss between my laptop and my router. After lots of fiddling and net searching and Dell help searching and asking lots of really smart friends what they know or what they would do to try to diagnose the issue, I finally decided to go down and buy a new wireless router. Evidently newer Dell laptops aren't so happy with older Linksys routers and nobody seems to know why. People who know their stuff pretty much all say they got frustrated and just went down to spring for a new router and then life was happy.


Anyway. They made it sound so easy. I figured I'd head to the store, buy the router, plug it in, configure it and that everything would magically work. Yes. I'm hopelessly naive at times.


I decided I'm going to stick with Linksys for 2 reasons. One is that the price is less than other comparable models with no apparent dings I can find on the web. Two is that I was happy with my old router. My laptop WLAN card supports both 811.b and 811.g so I figured it was time to have a router that does the same.


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So I get the 54g.


By the time I get home, I have about 1 hour to unbox the puppy and set it up before I have to leave. I'm optimistic that I'll have a happy connection in no time though. Admin on my old router was a piece of cake really. I don't imagine this will be harder.


So I open the box. There is no documentation in the box except for two steps.
Step 1: Make sure you PC is connected with a network cable directly to your modem.
Step 2: Run the CD.
Ok. Fine. I'd much rather just config it with the admin tool but this won't take that much longer.


So I do this. I cable it as stated, verify I can get to the net from my PC and pop in the CD. And the wizard starts. It tells me it will detect my configuration and will automatically configure my new router for me. Ok. "Next". The only problem is that the wizard consistently tells me my PC is not connected to the internet. I am not allowed to navigate any further. And there is no apparent way around the wizard. I cycle my modem and try again. No dice. I ipconfig release/renew and try again. No dice. I reboot my computer. No dice.


As you can imagine, my patience is wearing thin at this point. I know if I can just get to the admin tool, it'll take me less than 5 minutes to be finished. I decide to see what happens if I network the new router in and hit the factory default router admin URL from my old router. I think there's a chance I'll be able to bypass the wizard. No dice. Server error.


Ummm. Yeah. I know I'm not going to win any awards as a network god. But I'm not trying to do anything complex either. I think of my poor mother trying to set up something like this and almost cry. Obviously if you don't work for Linksys or cannot figure out how to trick the system, you may as well just take the hardware back for a refund and resign yourself to living with newspapers, faxes and USPS for the rest of your life. Heck. Why don't you just go live in a cabin in Lincoln, MT? I'm sure you'd find something to do with your time. (Poor joke, I know.)


I go get a glass of water, pondering how I'm going to trick the system. It wants to find a network configuration to get past the blocking wizard step. Perhaps if I can get it to find "a" connection and configure the new router, even incorrectly, then I'll be able to get to the admin utility. Worth a shot.


I plug in the old router, run the wizard, get through most of the steps, plug in the new router and let it autoconfig ... and then the wizard again bombs telling me that the configuration is incorrect. Again, I have no way out. Linksys says "Heather, you're a moron. Want to try again? Of course you'll still be a moron. But you're welcome to run through the exact same exercise until you finally understand you're a moron."


For my last ditch effort, I again try the factory default admin URL/passwd listed in the docs for my old router, hoping that since a config has been laid down I'll now be able to get to it using this connection info on my new router. And voila. Finally. I'm in.


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At that point it was short work to configure it and get my connection back. And at that point I had only 5 minutes left.


I ran upstairs, reconfig'd my laptop with the new 128-bit WEP key and verified that I had a connection. Amazingly, again it was much zippier ... when I actually had a connection. Bummer. I was still getting painfully high packet loss.


So ... today (2d later), I had some time to futz with it again. It was time to start playing with the knobs to see if I could fix it.


I started with the MTU rate. On my old router I couldn't turn this knob. My dad said that he had to futz with it in order to make his home network happy. No dice. Lowering that value didn't have any noticeable positive impact on the reliability of my connection.


And then I went back to check what I should've started with ... that's right ... the channel. My fancy new router has a bunch more channels than my old one. My old one only had 6. My new one has 11. I recalled seeing one random post where somebody mentioned when they set the router channel really high, life became happy with Broadcom cards. So I tried setting it to 11.

Yep. That change made a huge difference. I'm now getting 100% reliability almost all the time. I still have one more issue that I need to spend some time on. My signal strength fluctuates significantly and often and is typically lower overall on this laptop, though no other laptop seems to have had that issue. I'll work on this later. At least now I have something livable.


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What did I learn? The wireless diagnostic tools that came with this laptop are useless in trying to isolate and solve a problem like this. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place, but tools on the net are pretty much non-existent. The Dell laptop didn't come with any documentation on the advanced settings of the card or the driver and I cannot even download docs on driver config anywhere. The Linksys docs obviously were useless because you can't easily get to them until after you get through the wizard; I probably could've looked for them on the CD if it had come to that. My mom could never deal with an issue like this. I figured it out by some combination of ping, hunches, having enough common sense to know I needed to look at each leg of the information journey (and simple knowledge of how to do this) and trial & error.


90% of home users out there probably have the exact same setup and use case. There really ought to be tools that help that path work properly and that make it easy on them to troubleshoot. And there should always be a back door if the happy path fails. When I think of having to call Dell to discuss this, I just cringe. They wouldn't be able to do any more than I did and my guess is they'd end up telling me to buy a new router ... and when that failed they'd tell me to call Linksys ... and the ping pong game would begin. To be clear, I'm not unhappy that I'm having this issue. Though I am frustrated, I mostly chalk it up to the realities of trying to get older and newer equipment working together as standards evolve. This is part of life IMO.


But Linksys gets the big negative ding in my book. Truly BAD software makes it even harder for normal people to succeed. And especially if you can't make it work reliably, you should at least give the user a way out so they can plug in values on their own. This really isn't rocket science. Factory defaults work for the most part and there are only about 5 settings that need special attention for 90% of the people out there. And the other 10% either knows how to set the rest of what they need or they hire somebody to do it for them. I suppose this must not be a trivial problem since the tools for troubleshooting are thin. But the more esoteric the problem, the better the software needs to be ... and the more escape hatches to "do it yourself" one should have. Linksys really should hire somebody who knows something about software and usability.