NETGEAR WNDR3700 dropping wifi issues using Eircom broadband modem

[Feb 14, 2011] No soon had I posted about having wonderful hassle free internet then the blasted thing gave me all sorts of trouble again! This time I have a solution but you're not going to like it :) I bought a second hand netgear adsl2+ modem to use instead of the Eircom router. I noticed on the eircom router that it was dropping access to the attached Netgear router. I reckon I had a dodgy unit as using this new netgear router is amazing. No dropped wifi. No issues loading pages. Just smooth fast broadband! For those wondering about setting up a different router on Eircom you will need to use the User: eircom and Password: broadband1 to access the service. Most modern routers will auto detect all the other techno bits. Phew, it's been a long journey but it's definitely worth it.

[Jan 29, 2011] Ok, finally got this working! I now have DoS protection and SIP ALG back on but QoS still off. My MTU size is set to 1453 and, most importantly, I turned the firewall off on my ISP router as this was giving me hassle when in use with this Netgear router. Everything is now working great. Hopefully this post will help others who end up having problems with this router and their wifi dropping!

[Jan 25, 2001] Looks like I'm still having problems with the router dropping my wifi. I have turned off QoS options and DoS protection along with disabling SIP ALG. Hopefully this will do the trick as I'm running out of options to turn off! The router might be fast but it's useless if it keeps dropping the signal with zero feedback as to why :(

I recently purchased a new dual band Netgear wndr3700 for my house as I wanted something with a bit more oompf than the standard telecom company router (a company called Eircom). The main reason I picked up this new router was that I didn't want slower, older, wireless b/g devices slowing down my wireless n devices which I was using more and more for streaming to my tv.

For the first few weeks everything was ok but as I started to use this router more I noticed that web pages would randomly fail to load for me. It quickly became a huge irritation as browsing the web became a huge chore!

After reading up on the Netgear forums I noticed that a lot of other people were having this issue also. Thankfully the suggestions there helped fix my problem.

So, what did I do? It was all down to the MTU (Maximum Transmit Unit) setting on my Netgear router. By default the router had set this value to 1500 but anything above 1492 would cause massive drop outs with my modem. Setting the value to 1492 has worked a charm for me and if you have a similar issue I would recommend you try this quick trick to get things working smoothly again.

I did come across a pretty good tool called TCP Optimizer that would allow you test your maximum MTU setting for your modem. You can download the file from http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Get In Touch

Follow me online at TwitterFacebook or Flickr.

Latest Tweets