Network Devices

The hard thing about listing faults of wireless and network devices is that your performance can vary dramatically from someone else's.

Some factors which may effect your experience are ;

• Your hardware configuration
• Your software configuration
• Spy-ware installed on your PC
• The design of your house and / or where inside the device is positioned
• The materials your home is made of - wood, brick, tin roof ,local wiring in the walls.
• Your ISP
• Cordless phones and other electrical devices 
• You - many users don't configure the device correctly, get someone else to give you a second opinion.
• Line condition - for wired devices

For the average home user the majority of problems are usually caused by a poorly or mis-configured device or firewall. If you have read the manual, checked your settings and are sure problems are not caused by your basic set up, then there are a few things you can try before "throwing in the towel" and buying another access point, router or modem.

Interference

If you are trying to diagnose persistent problems on a wireless network the second most common group of problems can be traced to RF interference, misdirected antennas and "dead spots".

Many of the items in the above list relate to interference or blocking of a wireless signal. Even though 802.11 is a robust protocol that was designed to be resilient to interference from other wireless devices, its performance can be degraded by devices that transmit or leak in the same bandwidth.

Items such as  microwave ovens, cordless phones, Blue-tooth devices, wireless video cameras, wireless security devices, outdoor microwave links, wireless game controllers, fluorescent lights, motion detectors, automation sensors, WiMAX, and so on may be the culprit you are looking for. 

Even bad electrical connections can cause broad RF spectrum emissions.

The most common "fix" for this type of problem.
 

• Poor performance in this case can often be corrected by better locating/aligning an antenna. If possible try moving the router/modem to another location.
• If you believe interference is the cause of poor performance, then the most common solution is to reconfigure your access point to use a different channel. The simplest "fix" is to identify a channel that isn't subject to interference and reconfigure your wireless network to use that channel - your modem or routers admin interface will have the tools to do this.
  In 802.11 b/g you have a choice of 14 channels (11 channels in North America) - where each channel is a range of frequencies. These frequencies overlap between adjacent channels. A wireless device that transmits in the frequency range of channel 1 not only interferes with channel 1 but possibly effects channels 2, 3, etc
• Try to identify what is causing the interference and remove it from the networking environment.

About the way wireless devices are listed on this site:

 If a fault listed on our site mentions poor range or signal we will have confirmed that a large number of people have reported it. We do however suggest you do further research yourself.

When making an issue submission we are particularly interested in a few things and would appreciate it if users would report them.

• Is the unit a re-brand of a previous model
• Does it utilize all standard protocols
• Missing network features
• If voip does it have PSTN fall-back

Use the following link to search for relevant reviews or faults associated with the Routers. The results are provided by our custom Google search, which attempts to return more meaningful data for individuals researching hardware or electronics products prior to purchase.
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