What are people's impressions of this router? I installed one for a customer
who bought one with his new subscription to BT. It seems to be VERY flaky
:-(
It comes with a patronising hand-holding app to configure it - but the app
bombed out part-way through and said the router couldn't talk to the
internet - hardly surprising as it hadn't asked for the ADSL username and
password at that stage. It took about half an hour being passed from pillar
to post in BT (their customer service is PATHETIC) before I found someone
who could tell me the correct settings to configure it manually, at which
point it sprang into life[*]. These settings are supposed to be configured
automaticaly by entering a product key (4-letter alphanumeric groups, like a
Windows serial key) but when I entered the one that tech support dictated,
the web interface froze.
Having got the router talking to the internet, I started configuring the PCs
to access it by wireless. I found DHCP to be very unreliable. Some PCs would
be given an IP address whereas others sat there for ages (effectively doing
an ipconfig /renew) and then timed out. The only way to get everything
talking reliably was to give all the PCs static IP addresses :-(
Even then my troubles weren't over. For no apparent reason, certain PCs
refused to talk to certain other PCs even at ping level. For example, PC A
could talk to PCs B, C and D, but PC B could only talk to C. This was even
the case with all PC firewalls disabled. Rebooting the router solved the
problem.
And it took a hell of a long time for the router to reboot and enable its
ADSL and wireless interfaces, compared with my Netgear router which takes
about 20 seconds from power-on to PCs being able to access internet by
wireless.
Just to add to my problems, when I went back yesterday, two PCs that I had
set up on Monday had lost their WPA-PSKs that I'd set up on all the PCs -
probably nothing to do with the router, but an added hurdle to be overcome.
[*] I wish ISPs would publish, in a prominent place on their web site, the
technical parameters such as ADSL parameters, format of ADSL username (eg
any suffix after the @ sign), POP/SMTP servers etc. I was very impressed
with Zen (for another customer) who sent out an email to the customer
quoting all the setup parameters for ADSL, email, news etc - so much easier
to have this than a crummy "helpful" app that is *supposed* to guide you
through, but which fails somewhere along the way with no means of setting
things manually.
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