Router Reset, Now Slow Internet?

[SteveAbootman]

Evening,

Today I came back home and for unimportant reasons had to reset my router. I added WPA2 Personal encryption. After doing this, I noticed that my internet speed was crawling.

I unplugged cable/router but to no avail. I then did a sanity check and plugged my laptop into the Ethernet port on the router and sure enough, a much better speed was had.

For fun, i reset the router again, and this time just ran a test using factory settings. Sure enough, the speed on wifi is terrible. At this point, I'm out of ideas.

Anyone have any suggestions on what may be going on and how I can fix the problem? For those who didn't bother to read - I HAVE unplugged and then plugged back in both cable box and router and had no success.

 

[S.B.G]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

Have you checked for updated firmware for your router? What brand and model do you have? What is the signal strength like and can you change the frequency band to a more powerful one [but less distance]?

 

[SteveAbootman]

Linksys - WRT160N. Signal strength is at full bars. The smallest band i can do is what it currently is set at (Right now standard 20, with Wide 40 being the other option)

I just updated the router firmware (from 1.02.xx to 1.2.11) but did not notice any difference

 

[S.B.G]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

While on do a speediest.net on wireless and wired configurations and see what the results are. Also check your DNS settings, are they static or DHCP?

 

[belvdr]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

While on do a speediest.net on wireless and wired configurations and see what the results are. Also check your DNS settings, are they static or DHCP?

It appears he already did a wired test. Additionally, DNS would not affect a speed test, as these tests measure data transfer time which occurs after DNS resolution. It could affect loading times for other sites though from a user perspective, as DNS resolution could be included.

OP, have you tried changing channels?

 

[SteveAbootman]

Thank you both for the help -- at this point i've tried just about everything i can think of, including changing channels, and using OpenDNS instead of the Comcast servers. I changed from open/WEP/WPA/WPA2, and saw no change there either.

This is a 3 year old router, so perhaps it's time for an upgrade....