Changing a wireless router

I’ve a number of tales of woe to regale you with this month, starting with the troubles I had when I tried to change my wireless broadband router.

Like the majority of home and small-business users, I rely on a free router supplied by my ISP. In my case it’s a Thomson TG785 from O2, which I use to connect both wired and Wifi networks to the internet.

Most of the time it works fine but, of late, it’s started to play up, at times dropping the internet connection or refusing to talk to anything connected to its wired ports.

It’s the latter that I find most frustrating as I mostly use wired connections and can’t access the router it to find out what’s wrong when this happens.

On the plus side, turning it off and back on again usually puts things right, but it takes time and, having restarted it for the umpteenth time the other day, I decided to take action ­ to replace the freebie router with something a bit more upmarket and, hopefully, reliable, in the form of a Draytek Vigor 2820.

However, changing from the router supplied by my ISP to a Draytek Vigor was far from straightforward.

Only the start of it
It should have been easy as I’d reviewed the Vigor before and had been meaning to switch to it permanently for some time as it has a lot more to offer than the Thomson hardware.

To begin with it has two Wan interfaces, one of which can be 3G, that can be used for both failover and load-balancing purposes. It also has a built-in virtual private network (VPN) server, a much better firewall and a lot more in the way of management options than the O2 router (see How to tailor your O2 wireless router, below).

In practice, however, swapping routers was far from simple, taking the best part of the day and, even then, failing to provide the results I’d hoped for.

Not through any fault of the router involved, but because of other issues. The first problem was getting the Vigor to connect to my ISP.

In theory I should have been able to just plug it in and switch it on, the modem automatically detecting the ADSL-2+ settings required. That, though, didn’t happen and, in my experience, rarely does.

Also, the settings I’d jotted down last time I used it must have been for a different service, as they didn’t work either.

I did find some information about setting up third-party routers on the O2 broadband website, but it was all pretty general and I spent a long time trying different permutations before I eventually worked out the appropriate protocols to use.

Then I discovered new firmware had been released for the router, one of the advantages of which was better stability with the latest ADSL2+ services.

I decided it would be wise to upgrade so downloaded said firmware, installed the update utility and attempted to squirt it over to the router.

Another hour or so later, I was no further forward. The firmware would start to copy across, get about three-quarters of the way and then stop. Disabling the desktop firewall helped, but in the end I had to get hold of an earlier update program and use that.

From then on it was plain sailing. The internet connection held, I quickly changed the router settings to match what I normally use and configured my Wifi devices to use WPA2. Fantastic, I thought.

Then my wife came home and tried to connect to my wireless network using the laptop supplied by her employer. It wouldn’t work and, to cut a very long story short, the Wifi adapter in her notebook refused to connect unless I downgraded from WPA2 to plain WPA-only security and told the Draytek router to only use channel 6.

At which point, I started having problems connecting with my Linux-powered notebook and had to spend yet more time trying different combinations to see if I could find settings to work with both.

Nothing worked satisfactorily and I was further hampered by the fact that I couldn’t change much on my wife’s laptop as the software needed to manage the Wifi interface wasn’t there.

So, come the end of the day I had to admit defeat and revert to the freebie Thomson router, which at least worked with everything even if it wasn’t quite as good as I wanted.

And the moral of the tale? Well a couple of things. First, if you’re going to swap routers you need to know in detail how it should be configured for the ISP you’ve signed up with, and that’s not always easy.

Second, you shouldn’t take compatibility for granted no matter what vendors might say, especially when it comes to wireless networks. Just because a router says it supports a particular type of security, there’s no guarantee it will work with other implementations. It should, but sometimes it won’t.

I’ve since told my wife to get her company to buy a new laptop with all the software needed to manage its Wifi interface and draft-N wireless ­ another potential can of worms and an option I didn’t even dare to enable on the Vigor router. Hopefully, that’ll happen soon, and I’ll be able to upgrade my router the way I planned.