I would consider myself a techie to a certain extent, though I am not too familiar with networking, at least from a technological standpoint.

So here’s my story - I have been using a wireless ‘b’ (802.11b) router for quite some time now and have no real problems. The only thing is that the Linksys BEFW11S4 is a little bulky and I was eyeing the new Linksys compact routers in the market. Till last week, they were quite expensive, so I did not even consider upgrading.

Last week, Best Buy had a no rebate required $35 price tag on one of the compact routers. So I thought to myself, it is a good price, and I will be upgrading my speed (Wireless ‘g’ - 802.11g) and range. So why not.

So I bought it. Came home and quickly unplugged the old router and connected the new one.

The Admin screen was slightly different, and I went through the various setups and I was good to go.

Or so I thought.

Basically, nothing worked. I have a Dell laptop with internal Intel wireless, and it started going crazy on me with the signal strength. It would start at ‘Excellent’ and then start going down to Very Good to Good to Low and finally, to Very Low. It came to a point where I could not be more than 5 feet away from the router to be able to get a consistent signal strength.

So the first thing I did was to upgrade the firmware on the router. The firmware upgrade seemed to improve the signal strength problem, but my pings to the router itself were crazy. I was getting 5% loss going from my laptop to my router! It was nonsense.

After several (at least 10) chats with Linksys chat, and quite a few (at least 4) calls to Linksys support, I got some tips on changing some advanced wireless settings which stabilized the pings. I have no losses now, which is a big relief.

Then I opened my company laptop, which is quite old, and in there, I have an external wireless ‘b’ card. Not so surprisingly, it would not even connect to the router! It would find 10 other wireless networks around my area, but not mine! At that point I was ready to throw something out of the window.

I upgraded the driver on the wireless card and it seemed to resolve some of the issues. I was able to connect to the router and get an IP address, but I did not get anything more than ‘Low’ on the signal strength on that one. For a while, I tried changing stuff on the card properties and stuff, but when none of that worked, I gave up on that.

Currently, my problem is that even on the Dell laptop, my wireless speed decreases as I browse web pages. That is bizarre, but true. So last night, I had a few friends come over for dinner and all of them are in the networking industry. They quickly were able to tell me ‘There is a bug in the router software - just return it and get a completely different model’.

Right. Good call. I will return it. But not get anything else. I am tired of wireless ‘g’ with all the fragility. Who needs speed more than 11Mbps when your internet connection itself is only 4Mbps at best? I don’t do music streaming across my network. I don’t do file transfers across the network much.

I am actually quite saddened to say that I am going back to wireless ‘b’ and won’t be changing the status quo for quite some time now.

And I actually wonder how other people, who are not inclined to upgrade firmware themselves or update wireless card drivers themselves, work in today’s complicated networking world.

Networking, especially with Windows, is so complex today, it is almost a farce. It is such a critical piece of being totally connected, with constant drops in prices of computing devices, but still it remains one of the most unintuitive thing to set up for a lay person.

Something must be done to ease networking - wired and wireless.