I have recently purchased a new home office router that connects two desktops and one laptop by wireless connection. Back at the store, I made my mind to purchase Linksys WRT54G over D-Link (I forgot the model) because there are a lot of good feedbacks on Linksys.
Everything was good the first two weeks we were using the router. The signal strength is good and my laptop can get decent W-Fi signal anywhere inside. Then the network became rather choppy, pings are intermittent, and worst, one desktop (particularly my desktop PC) cannot browse.
The weird thing I was able to download stuff using torrent, my Pidgin can sign in to my accounts on Yahoo and MSN Messenger and streaming video and music works. Everything works, except for the browser. I blamed the Linksys for this and contacted the support thrice, and I was given a lot of configurations that should be done in the router settings, none of which solved my problem.
Googling around got me some help and apparently, this weird symptoms are caused by the traffic from torrent downloads. To fix this, these settings must be done on the torrent client:
1. Reduce the download and upload speed of torrent client. Since I use the lightweight uTorrent Client, I can simply do this by right-clicking the uTorrent taskbar and selecting the download speed that I want. The procedure could be different depending on your client.
2. Disable DHT. DHT stands for Distributed Hash Tables and disabling this in torrent client effectively solved my problem with browsing. Again in uTorrent, this can be done by pressing CTRL+P to open the Preferences window and selecting the BitTorrent tab. Uncheck the DHT selections and click OK to save the new settings. Restarting the client helps too.
I did these two steps and this solved the issue of not being able to browse the Internet while downloading torrents.
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What’s the version of your WRT54G? Looks like utorrent is hogging all the bandwidth when downloading some files. Have you tried the QoS on your router?
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It’s 7.0.1 if my memory serves me right. From what I’ve observed, the network goes down (no ping replies from the router) once uTorrent starts up. I don’t think it’s the speed alone since some downloads are just 15Kbps but still browsing isn’t working.
The Linksys support said it might have something to do with too many packets coming to and from the router so they made me adjust the MTU and lower it down, but that didn’t work.
I haven’t tried QoS yet, I’m going to try that out when I get home.
utorrent does chuck on some files, QoS is useless …
I recomment you try and get alternative client