For quite a while now we have been promoting the Belkin Pre-N WiFi Router (which has nothing to do with the actual 802.11n spec.) This was the only router that actually worked in my apartment building which is bombarded with 2.4GHz signals from all sides. It’s been about a year, and we’re trying to find a solution that we can deploy in much larger environments. Enter the Linksys WRT54GX4 SRX400 WiFi Router. Ahhhh, that just rolls off the tongue. I think I’ll just call it the SRX400 from now on.
We noticed a couple of minor problems with the Belkin Pre-N router that support was unable/unwilling to address for us. While the router will allow VPN connections to pass through, it will only allow one connection at a time. If my wife and I both need to VPN into work, well, only one of us can. The second problem is that is we overwhelm the base station with traffic, such as in a small/medium business (SMB) environment, it will crash. A lot. It was for these two reasons that I set out looking for a router that had the range, ability to break through a lot of wireless interference, and was reliable enough to deploy in a SMB office.
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I’ll spare you the story of the routers that we tried and failed from Belkin, Linksys, Netgear, ParkerVision and others. Needless to say, a lot of wireless routers simply don’t live up to expectations. I was starting to give up and looking at the grossly expensive Cisco Aironet solutions when I decided to take another look at Linksys (a division of Cisco.) When I had started the testing I had looked at the SRX200 model since the SRX400 was not out. I decided that it was worth the $150.00 to try a SRX400 before plopping down $700.00 on an Aironet.
The SRX400 is not as easy to configure as the Belkin Pre-N. If one wants to just plug it in and ignore security then it’s fine, but to lock it down took a little more work. If you’re a techie, then you won’t have any problems at all in a single-platform environment, but I have Macs, Windows and Linux boxes that need to talk wireless… It took a good 30 minutes of fiddling before finding the settings that would work on all three with maximum security. The Belkin Pre-N just worked out of the box with WPA encryption and MAC address lockdown on all three platforms, so at first I was a bit bummed. Then I tried using the base station.
The range was just as good as the Pre-N if not better, which is great since the Pre-N has fantastic range. I then started slamming the base station with data, as much as I could from both wired and wireless. Where the Pre-N would crash within 5 minutes, I was unable to get the SRX400 to die. This was a great sign! I kept hammering away by slinging 1080p HD files back and forth on every port I could find. The router was able to keep up just fine. My next step was to try VPN access from a few different boxes. I set up 4 computers and had them all VPN in, and much to my joy they all worked. I’m not sure what the maximum number of connections is, but it’s at least 4.
I was all excited. FINALLY someone has pushed Belkin off the top of the hill. I started minor deployment of the router in friends houses and whatnot to see how it did. All was running great until one night when the WiFi stopped working. No additional 2.4 GHz phones were in use, no devices were added to the network. It just stopped. A few days later I noticed some oddities in the way she performed in our SMB deployment. The base stations wireless would stop working, dropping all connections and not letting anyone back on until the base station was reset. I have yet to find a solution to this problem, and Linksys support was less than helpful. In the end Linksys told me to buy a different type of router as the SRX400 would not suit my needs. Interesting since all I want it to do is run WiFi 24x7 without crashing. Is that really too much to ask? I have messed with a few settings such as locking the station down to one channel and turning off adaptive channel expansion, but nothing seems to keep the SRX400 from shutting wireless off. I was able to get the WiFi router in my friends house pretty darn solid, but I still can’t seem to get the two routers at my SMB location to work like they should. Both keep dropping WiFi connections. It’s truly odd since the wired connections work just fine.
Which brings me back to square one. If you’re looking for a WiFi router that will work in an environment without a lot of access point and 2.4 GHz traffic, the SRX400 will do just fine. If you’re like me an need to get a couple of base stations working in a SMB which need to run 24x7x365 as fast as possible without crashing… Then I guess we’re looking at a Cisco Aironet solution.
Has anyone had any luck running a WiFi system that will allow close to Ethernet speeds, is stable, and allows VPN pass through for less than $200.00 per unit? If so, please let me know so I can run out and grab a few! This is really starting to get annoying. Thoughts?
1. Posted by: Edward Harrison on May 12, 2006 8:56 PM:
I read your experience with the Belkin Pre-N router and the Linksys SRX 400 with great interest because I have been having all manner of problemswith my Belkin Pre-N and have had it with the model. I have just ordered a Netgear RangeMax NEXT Wireless Router with Gigabit Ethernet after reviewing a bunch of review sites on the Airgo 3 Gen routers.
I loved the Belkin at the start. It has amazing range in the two home environments I deployed it in. In fact, when I bought it I took my laptop outside and walked 300 feet into the park adjacent to my house before I lost the signal. It has amazing range and no dead spots unlike the D-Link DI-624M I upgraded from. But, ultimately, the Belkin was trouble for various reasons. First, it really never provided the throughput boost I needed. It averaged 1.8MBps (14.4mbps) on the wireless side and about 7MBps (56mbps) on the wired side. Now, all decent new computers including my laptop have had gigabit Ethernet as standard for a couple of years now. I don't know why these routers don't provide gigabit wired as standard.
But, my real problem came from the constant crashing. Today for example, I was streaming iTunes to an Airport running Firefox and transfering large files via pcAnywhere on the Network and....boom, crash, dead wireless link. I couldn't get the thing to communicate wirelessly so I had to go and manually restart. What a pain. This happens multiple times daily and has become a real bore.
So, Finally I figured out where the problem lay today. As you found, it's all on the wireless side. I ran some heavy simultaneous traffic through the router for 5 minutes today (large file transfer via pcAnywhere, Internet usage, iTunes wirelss transfer and streaming video from my server). The router crashed. I couldn't connect to other computers on the network from my laptop, I had zero Internet access, and iTunes stoped streaming. Then I transferred part of the load to the wired ports and tried the same experiment. The router crashed again within 5 minutes. But, this time I checked the computers on the wired side and they worked flawlessly, everything was humming on all cylinders, file transfer, Internet access, you name it.
So, my diagnosis is that the chipsets in these models based on Airgo True Mimo Gen 1 cannot handle heavy wireless traffic. They simply crash the wireless side of the router after a point without affecting their wired routing ability. The DHCP lists are still operable with the IP addresses reserved as before, but there is simply no access to the wireless routerclients while the wiredclients remained unaffected.
I've decided to give up after months ofthis type of behaviour and am going tomove to a model based on Gen3 True Mimo with Gigabit Ethernet. From what I have read they have the same or better range, better throughput than fast ethernet (100mbps) and gigabit wired ports. I just hope they can handle the traffic. Only time will tell.
As for the Belkin Pre-N Router, I am extremely disappointed and would rateit 2 stars out of 5 for its range and throughput. But it simply can't handle heavy wireless traffic loads.