WNR2000 WiFi connection drops!!

[jayjay1122]

Greetings all!!

First an apology: I am a newb to this site but an IT professional for 15 years and I see all the posts about WNR2000 connection problems and (maybe I'll even get booted for this) but all I see back are a lot of questions about adapters and hard resets of routers and not a lot of solutions other than trying an older firmware. So my apology is for 1, starting another post on the topic and 2, for maybe sounding a little gruff right of the bat!

***My wired connection is flawless!!!!!

I am going to provide as much information as is possible about my equipment/situation:

- WNR2000 v1 (Firmware 1.2.3.7)
- Encryption WPA2
- MAC Address filters
- SSID is being broadcast
- Channel is set to Auto
- Mode is 300Mbps

- Dell Laptop (adapter = Intel 4965AGN)
- Ipod Touch
- HTC Droid Eris

The long and short of it is that none of the equipment mentioned above, can seem to maintain a WiFi connection with this router. The cell phone (HTC Eris) is the worst, losing connectivity within 30 seconds, the Ipod touch is second but seems to re-connect on its own and the laptop is last, losing connection within anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes of connecting.

Taking the cell phone and Ipod out of the equation, in order to re-establish connection on the laptop, I need to either reboot it or the router and then connection is ok again until some random interval where the connection times out again.

I have also confirmed that when I lose "data connectivity", the laptop, Ipod and cell phone maintain a strong wifi signal as well as their IP Addresses but all of their MAC ID's have been flushed from the router's "connected devices" table. This router has no configurable aging timer that I am aware of to control the timeout or aging of the MAC Address table.

Lastly, I have had the opportunity to test all the above settings at work on a Linksys, a DLINK as well as the Routers my company manufactures and none of the wifi connectivity problems have shown themselves on those devices. My laptop and phone (didnt bother with the Ipod) stay connected all day long with no problems.

Does anyone have any advice or anything I can look at because I am seriously considering going back to firmware 1.2.0.8 as I have seen others try with mixed results.

Thanks you all in advance!!

[ppalmer116]

jayjay i am having the EXACT problem and i am no IT expert... have you gotten an answer? because i am about to buy new gear and just start over

[grimreaper445]

You 2 are not alone! I recently bought this router from consumer depot and it has been doing the same thing!! It replaced a linksys wrt54g with ddwrt firmware and a wap54g setup as a vlan to my custom built I7 machine triple booted with Win 7 x64, Ubuntu 9.10, and Backtrack 4 Final. Besides the I7 machine on the network I have an I7 dell laptop running the exact same setup as the I7 desktop, a FreeNAS server, Win Server 2003 R2, Iphone, gf's Palm Treo, and 2 other PCs running Fedora 12 and XP. I haven't had time to pin this down but obviously I have been thinking it was the router and not my ISP because none of this started until I hooked up this freaking netgear! The thing is, its only the internet connection that drops, I can still ping all hosts on my subnet, just no internet! I did just lower the MTU from 300Mbps to 145Mbps.. Its not like I was ever getting ANYWHERE NEAR that anyway... In fact, so far my wrt54g was twice as fast! I looked on netgears support and the 1st thing they say is "you have a virus"! Typical answer from someone that doesn't know what the heck they are doing! This is why I haven't even considered calling their support. Since I lowered the MTU I haven't had a drop, yet it's only been about 20 minutes... I am using all of the switch ports on the router, and those connections drop just as the wireless does, therefore I am not expecting lowering the MTU will solve this issue. If anyone finds out anything, plz let us know. Thanks.

[Kirbz252]

I can confirm that it is infact the current 1.2.3.7 firmware for the WNR2000 v1.

Im a beta tester for netgear and currently testing a new wireless adapter they have released. Everything on my wireless network is 802.11n and was working flawlessly until I updated from the 1.2.0.8 firmware to the current 1.2.3.7

Best advice for everyone is to downgrade until netgear get a grip and sort it out.

I'd advise people to send netgear a support email informing them. They need to know that the problem isnt isolated to a few devices.

David

[iandarlington]

how do u down grade router

[jmizoguchi]

Originally Posted by iandarlington

how do u down grade router

just get lower version firmware and load up.

[jayjay1122]

Originally Posted by ppalmer116

jayjay i am having the EXACT problem and i am no IT expert... have you gotten an answer? because i am about to buy new gear and just start over

ppalmer, I have not heard a single thing about any fix or suggestion other than to downgrade the firmware (shouldn't have to and have not yet). I even went against my better judgment (knew it wouldn't work) and performed a "hard reset" and manually set the router back up from scratch instead of loading my saved config and nothing! Everything is the same!

I enable WiFi, device gets its IP Address, connects and I can surf and then bam, some time later my connection times out but the device maintains its IP and the Routers MAC Table shows the device was flushed!

I am convinced there is something in this router that is flushing WiFi clients from the MAC table causing their connectivity to become compromised. Simply put, if a device gets flushed from the MAC table but maintains its IP and signal strength the ARP protocol gets "broken" and data simply cannot flow through the device.

The most frustrating thing about this is that my actual internet connection (router to cable modem) is flawless and I can reach the WWW 24/7/365 with a wired connection. This "piece" simply won't maintain WiFi!

I will update this thread if I discover anything definitive one way or the other!

I find it hard to believe that this is not a known issue!

[jayjay1122]

Originally Posted by grimreaper445

The thing is, its only the internet connection that drops, I can still ping all hosts on my subnet, just no internet! I did just lower the MTU from 300Mbps to 145Mbps...Since I lowered the MTU I haven't had a drop, yet it's only been about 20 minutes... I am using all of the switch ports on the router, and those connections drop just as the wireless does, therefore I am not expecting lowering the MTU will solve this issue. If anyone finds out anything, plz let us know. Thanks.

grimreaper,
Any update? I know our issues are a little different as I maintain "Layer 2" connectivity as well as from the Router to my ISP.

[myti]

I find it hard to believe that this is not a known issue!

I agree, I have exactly the same problem. I was thinking maybe my Cable modem cannot work together with the WNR2000 or something..

Wired or Wireless to the Netgear, connection seems stable but internet drops all the time..
Wired to my cable modem, no problem at all!

[bone3009]

I'm having exactly the same problem with this router and iPod connectivity. When connected it might get up to >8.5Mb/s but will regularly cut out. And I am using v1.2.0.8! I can't see how it can only be an issue about the firmware upgrade.