An hour with the WRT610N, or How I Finally Have Decent WiFi

Back Story

Before the WRT610N, I had spent a grand total of $10 on wireless technology. If the adage is true, you can imagine that with what I’d paid for, I’d not gotten a lot. I did however, have a cheapy ZyXel P-330W wireless-G router ($10) and a D-Link Wireless-G router I got from Freecycle. The D-Link? Like every piece of D-Link equipment I’ve owned, it is a piece of crap. The version of the router I got is apparently plagued by overheating and reboots. When it was up and running, coverage was decent, but I had to pull the case apart and put a fan on it to keep it cool enough just to transfer files between machines on my local network. A fan. On a network router. Give. Me. A. Break.

The sound pollution just wasn’t worth it. We’d moved the (much more fully featured) ZyXel upstairs to act as a wireless client for my daughter’s computer, so to go back to using that as our house router would have required purchasing another wireless adapter. And, I was about to order my wife’s new MacBook. While I could tolerate intermittent dropouts on the network, I wasn’t about to come home every day to complaints about how much the network sucked. So that would be two draft-n clients and a .11g client, with plans to add a HTPC later in the year. Oh, and we occasionally have 15-20 guests descend on our house with laptops.

I don’t like to have my bandwidth interrupted. I want the higher speeds. So I went looking for a simultaneous dual-band router. I was advised to get a business-class WAP for stability’s sake and use a wired router (I have one already). Excellent idea, but wireless access points in the business class START at $300 and go up from there. Like everyone else, I too am a victim of recession and spending $300 on this didn’t seem to be a good first resort. So, enter the Linksys WRT610N. It’s a Linksys, which is good, since I’ve had nothing but good luck from them. It’s GigE on ALL the wired ports, including the WAN port. That’s good, since I recently upgraded to RoadRunner Turbo which is >10Mbit. Reviews on NewEgg tended to be in the 4-5 range with the 1s taken up mostly by people who have to use adaptive technology for web surfing since their head seems permanently lodged in their rectum.

In The Box

I ordered the WRT610 from NewEgg for about $150. It arrived quickly, as expected. Inside the package are the router, an ethernet cable, a startup packet, and the power adapter. I must say that I do like this power adapter better than previous wall-wart style models from Linksys. It uses a laptop-brick style adapter that has a standard laptop-style removable cable that plugs into the wall and the power brick. The power brick has an LED that indicates you’re connected to the juice and a fixed cable to the router.

Setup

I connected my wired desktop PC to the router’s port 1 and the WAN port of the router to my cable modem. I reset the cable modem and powered on the Linksys. In case you were wondering, it really was that simple to get internet back on my wired PC.

Linksys may have invested a bunch of money in pretty software to help you configure things and set them up, but if you’ve bothered to get THIS router, chances are you know what you’re doing. The login and password are the standard for Linksys, and the router defaults to 192.168.1.1. I changed that and the admin password immediately. The web interface looks exactly like every other recent model Linksys router, so there are no big surprises. Just click around and set things up to your liking.

Next I set up the wireless. I set up WPA2 passwords on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and set up different SSIDs on both. Then I got out my trusty Lenovo X200 and tried to log on.

My laptop would only recognize the 2.4GHz SSID. This was troubling, since a) I had paid for both bands to work at once, and b) I wanted my laptop to be the primary user of the 5GHz band with the 2.4GHz band for everyone else. I did some frantic googling and read some reports of defective 5GHz setups, requiring RMA. Not a good sign, methinks, but let me do some debugging. I completely disabled the 2.4GHz band and turned off security on the 5GHz band. Viola! There it was, with lovely signal strength, showing up in the network list.

When I went to re-add security to the 5GHz band I got an interesting error message. WPA2 passwords must be at least 8 characters. The previous password I had used was 7 characters long, but I got no error.

It looks like there’s a bug in the error reporting on the security web page for WRT610N. If you have both 2.4GHz and 5GHz security enabled, the error reporting for the 2.4GHz band (which occurs further down the page) will overwrite any errors from the 5GHz band’s config. So, if you screw up your 5GHz band but the 2.4GHz stuff is okay, you won’t get an error.

With that discovered, I re-enabled the 2.4GHz band and everything was detected. Booyah.

Wireless Connectivity

I changed my SSIDs with the new router, so I had to go and reconfigure the little ZyXel box. This involved a full configuration reset for it, because once it goes into client mode, it’s impossible to update. Did the reset, added in the new configuration and it came back online immediately.

As for my Thinkpad, everything worked great, once I told it to ignore Wireless Protected Setup and let me enter the password. I was advised to disable WPS completely and just do things manually. I’ve got no problem with that, since entering a password is not really a sufficiently big deal to skip it.

File transfers on the network jumped to over 5MB/sec and I was seeing a consistent 60 – 120Mbit link from my living room to the router in the office. The link seemed stable at 300Mbit when the laptop was in the same room as the router, although I’ve not done a file transfer in that room to check performance.

Other Thoughts

This router vents heat to the bottom, which is a bit bizarre. The only thing I can imagine is that the router is intended to be hung vertically on a wall. I have not done so yet, but I might as electronics performance improves with lower temps.

Firmware updating was easy through the web interface and didn’t wipe configuration settings, at least on the upgrade I did.

This router is listed as a WIP for DD-WRT. I have NOT downloaded or tried the DD-WRT development firmware. For those of you using DD-WRT, would I get performance or range gains over the stock firmware? Or is it just in feature set?

Having a GigE port for WAN is nice, considering that we upgrade things like routers far less frequently than we upgrade our network performance. My old Linksys wired router lasted more than 8 years and started with a 512k/64k DSL line. Now, my performance is more like 18Mbit/1.5Mbit, with speed increases coming on 1-2 year basis. It’s nice to realize that I won’t come close to topping out my router before I’ll need to replace everything else.

The antennas on this router are internal. I don’t personally have a problem with that. If you want high gain antennas, this is probably not the model for you.

This model also takes the new Linksys styling which is black and shiny and has shaped LEDs to indicate function. I kind of like square LEDs with labels and boxy boxes, but I’d like very much to start ignoring my router again so this isn’t really that big a deal. If you have to have your router visible, it’s pretty sleek. Just make sure to wipe up your fingerprints when you’re done caressing it.

Wrap-Up

I have about 2 hours experience with the router so far, however my wife reports that the internets don’t seem any more retarded than usual. Long term performance remains to be evaluated.

Thanks for the guest post, Keith!