The Derwent Internet Saga continues....

Recall that in the previous post, the router in my flat had died and we had bought a new one to replace it.

It turns out the replacement was faulty as well, frequently losing the ADSL connection, so Wei Chieh and I went to PC World to get it exchanged. Since, according to forum posts we read, gateway dropping is a common problem with this model, we decided to switch models and go for a Netgear.

After coming home and installing it, we found that we had taken a wired-only router. D'oh!

So we went back to PC World again. The salesman was really nice about it and let us change to a model with wireless. So we took up the Netgear RangeMax model DG834PN (the PN suffix stands for Pre-N), and came home.

A short digression: Pre-N technology essentially is an element of the still-in-draft-stage 802.11n wireless standard, which promises much higher throughput as well as better range. The DG834PN implements MIMO into today's Wireless-G. According to Netgear, it uses 6 antennae 'intelligently' (I put quotes here, because I doubt the machine has any intelligence of its own) to reduce the effects of interference. From using it, I've found that it marginally improves reception in my room, but I still get the occasional drop *sigh*

The DG834PN is a breeze to set up and there are lots of settings and numbers. I like it. Unfortunately, it seems that wireless kit misfortune is a plague of this household: this box connected in minutes of plugging it in, but refused to perform any DNS lookups. So I called Netgear technical support, and after half an hour of walking through a variety of solutions, the engineer gave me a reference number and told me to take the router back.

Now this sucked big time: it was Sunday and too late to return this one to PC World.

Out of desperation and perhaps some enlightenment as well, I tried power cycling the router and voila... it worked perfectly.

Until this morning, that is. Wei Chieh reported DNS failures and ADSL drops. So, in the midst of exams, we're going to send this one back too. Here's hoping this is the last time.