Not All Wirelesses Are Created Equal

I should have known. The day after I got a cable modem installed in my apartment, I learned that I would not have the place to myself for very long. It's my employer's apartment, you see, and said employer will be lodging one other new employee here starting at the end of the month. Oh perrrrfect.

Oh, well, no big deal, I think – I'll just go get a router so we can share the connection. And since the difference between wired and wireless models is quite small these days, I might as well get a wireless model so we don't have to run cat-5 cable all over the apartment. Plus I can work lying down, or standing up, which will be easier on my back than sitting all day at a desk in the corner.

So I head over to Ye Olde Computer Shoppe (or, as we say in Swedish, "Je Ölde Kåmpytr Skjöp") and pick up a D-Link DI-624. It's not what I would have preferred, but it's there, and I figure, how bad can it be?

Some fifteen hours of futzing later, I have my answer: it can be very bad. Not quite crossing-the-streams-bad, but bad enough. Oh, the simple stuff works fine, of course, and as long as I connect my computer to the router with a cable there's no problem. But I really do need to be able to work on the couch (or the floor), and that's where the fun starts. (Well, actually, that would be the bed, but that's a topic for another blog.)

The problem is that it's considered bad form to leave a wireless connection wide open. Unless you're in the business of providing public Internet access (and I'm not), it is generally a good idea to turn on some sort of access control to whatever wireless setup you have, and to encrypt the traffic between your computer(s) and the wireless access point. And the moment I try to turn on encryption in this particular device – so that every neighbor within a 50-meter radius can't get on my connection and surf for porn on my employer's dime, not to mention that I need to be careful about making sure the confidential work-related stuff on my computer stays that way – everything stops working. No web access, no ssh, no nothing. Not even so much as a ping.

Cold. Kaput. Nada. Zilch.

Encryption off? No problem. Encryption on? No soup for you. (Or me.) At one point, I think – and I'm not entirely certain about this – I actually saw flames coming out of the back of the router. Fortunately, I was able to turn off the encryption before it torched my whole living room.

OK, so I'm kidding about the pyrotechnics. But it really did stop working altogether... making this purchase totally useless for me, and chewing up a good part of my weekend in the process. I spent enough time reading the docs, hunting around newsgroups, and trying (with little success) to call the manufacturer's tech support line, to convince myself that the problem really was with the device, and not anything I was doing. (I finally gave up and sent a long email to the support address, listing the bugs I'd found in exhaustive detail; the next day I got an email reply agreeing the thing was defective.) The strange thing is that the issues don't seem to be indicative of a broken unit, but rather a fundamental flaw in the firmware – which means that many, many people are likely out there having the same problems. And if that is indeed the case, how is it possible that a company would release a product that sucks so much ass?

Yesterday, I returned the flamethrower router to its place of purchase, and instead spent a couple of hours parambulating about town looking for the model I'd originally wanted, a Linksys WRT54G (which is an elegant, reliable box even if you're not brave and/or stupid enough to let it be all it can be). I finally found a store that had them in stock, brought one home, and had it up and running in under 15 minutes. Done. Encryption and everything. Reliable signal in every corner of the apartment, including the balcony. (And no flames.) I will probably draw the wrath of Edsel Murphy upon my head for saying this, but it has been working flawlessly from the moment I installed it and shows no sign of doing otherwise. And now, thanks to my newfound wirelessness, I can write this entry sitting outside, watching the last rays of the setting sun light up the buildings across the street.

So, the object lessons for the day are these: 1) Fire: good for s'mores, not so good for computer equipment; 2) I'm sure the people at D-Link are hardworking and decent, but the DI-624 can suck a donkey through twenty feet of garden hose; and 3) No one likes a broken unit.

Thus endeth the lesson.