Last week our home communication network came to a screeching halt.
Our phone hasn’t been working right in a while. Everything was good for a while after I rewired everything, but then things slowly started to degrade. The line to the corded wall phone in the kitchen went dead. Then the line to the cordless phone went dead. So we had no phone. Actually, this happened back on Halloween, the night of the break-in.
On Tuesday or Wednesday, Berta said she was having trouble with the internet on her computer. It was too slow. So I logged in there to check on it. After fiddling with things a bit, it turns out that the router just sucks. I mean, it started out great, but after a while it just cut out every so often. So I was fiddling with that trying to get it cooled off, since I assumed that the heat was the problem. Remember last time, when I iced it down? Well, that didn’t work this time.
Actually, when I was done with it, the router didn’t work at all. My computer couldn’t even connect. Totally unacceptable. So I ordered some new equipment.
The new router is a Linksys WRT54GP2. It’s an 802.11G wireless router with a 3-port QoS-capable hub and Vonage service built in. It’s pretty slick. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it reboots every time you change a setting. That makes massive changes pretty slow to commit to the box. Still, it works, which is more I can say for the old NetGear.
Yes, it has Vonage service build into it. We’ve had Vonage (apparently pronounced VAH-nij, not like I’ve been doing it - voh-NAJ or VOH-nij) for a while now. Not as long as Pat, but a reasonably long time considering that it’s such a fledgling technology. One of Berta’s complaints was always that when I would download stuff with BitTorrent, there wasn’t enough bandwidth left to maintain a phone connection, and there would be so significant delay in the audio that you really couldn’t use it. Normally, there’s no problem, just when I was downloading a lot. The problem is that the Motorola Vonage box was inside the NetGear router when it really should have been outside or managed via QoS (Quality of Service), which the NetGear router didn’t have.
Anyhow, I set up the new router, and last night after calling Vonage to do a “MAC Addres Swap”, wherein they replaced the MAC address of the Motorola box with the one from the Linksys, everything works smoothly with 50% less network hardware! The only thing left to do with the network is reconfigure the printer settings on the computers to use the old Linksys 2-port print server/hub, since we were all set to use the print server in the NetGear box. I’ll have to wait until the printer has black ink again, though. Too expensive at Circuit City.
At Circuit City, I bought a bunch of new phones. I got a brand new Uniden 5.8Ghz base station and an additional extension, for a total of three cordless handsets. Kitchen, Bedroom, Computer room. The Uniden model was recommended highly by users on Amazon. It was a cinch to set up, and removed the whole wiring variable from the phone equation. I may yet rewire the kitchen wall phone, since Nana likes to use that instead of figuring out how to use the cordless. (Nana - Big Silver Button) But that’s probably even secondary to the printer ink.
Another nice perk is that the 5.8Ghz phone doesn’t interfere with the 2.4Ghz wireless network. In fact, the other day I had the notebook in the bedroom upstairs from the router, and had no problem using the internet. I can actually use the internet everywhere in the house now! The range on the old router wasn’t good at all.
So all is well in phone-land. Now if I only had some people to talk to on the phone…
