WGA600N/WRT160N intermittent connection issues?

[timytamy]

We have had another look at our problem and after a few hours of trouble shooting we worked out that our uni's wi-fi was causing the problems... not our batteries. To solve this we changed our routers channel to 4 as its not used that often.

Hope that helps,
timytamy

[Kevin Sevcik]

To all,

The problem is quite definitely FIRST's advice to switch the router channel to "Auto". We use the same router at work so we don't have to run wired ethernet to every machine we're building, and I ran into a similar problem. Our wireless routers were set for "Auto" channel selection as well, and I had difficulties getting one of the WGA600N bridges to connect consistently. Much searching on linksys's forums turned up this suggestion, and once we switched our routers to fixed channels, the problem went away.

That said, I have some specific advice about WHICH channel to pick for your router. 802.11b/g/n is a rather wide band signal, which means that your router takes up more than just the one channel you set it to. It actually takes up about 5 channels worth of bandwidth. So a router on channel 1 and a router on channel 2 are horribly interfering with each other. You end up need to space routers 5 channels apart to get good clean bandwidth for each router.

This means you should pick channel 1, 6, or 11 for your router, because that's what virtually every IT department out there is going to be doing as well to minimize interference. If channels 1, 6, and 11 are all being used in your immediate vicinity, DON'T try to shoehorn your router into, say channel 4. This means traffic from channels 1 and 6 are just noise that your router has to try to talk over. INSTEAD, pick whichever of channels 1, 6, and 11 is weakest in your area. 802.11bgn routers are intelligent. If they recognize a signal from another router on the same channel, they can coordinate to share that channel as necessary. They CAN'T do this if they're on even slightly different channels, which results in the router shouting louder to be heard, instead of politely waiting its turn.

TLDR; don't set your router channel to "Auto". Set it to channel 1, 6, or 11, whichever is weakest in your area.