After years of decent service, my Linksys WRT54G wireless router started acting up after getting WildBlue satellite Internet service. Before that, I’d had Comcast cable and Qwest DSL at various times all without trouble. After many years, was it just my router’s time to go? That’s what I figured, and after investing hours and hours working on the hobbling WRT54G over the last several months it was time to move on. Being an ex-computer programmer, it’s very hard to put down a tech problem without solving it, but this time I exercised my discipline to enjoy the freedom of not needing to understand or fix this router problem. So I took it outside and ended its misery (really mine).
After surfing around for a good replacement router, I picked up a Linksys WRT54GS2 just to show “no hard feelings” for my old nagging Linksys router. Got it home and began to set it up. The LAN worked fine, but couldn’t get outside to the Internet. So I disconnected the cable and hooked a laptop directly to the WildBlue satellite modem…boom, Internet was fine. Connected the computer back up to the router and…no Internet! After doing this nonsense for a couple hours, decided to surf around and see if anyone else was having similar troubles with my combination of equipment. Not surprisingly, yes, others were. On the forum WildBlue Uncensored, I found this article about the WRT54GS2:
http://www.wildblue.cc/wbforums/showthread.php?p=74980
The guy had the same problem with the WRT54GS2, bought a bunch of new routers and decided to try them one at a time. The first one was up and running in under 15 minutes! It happened to be the Netgear WGR 614v9. Although it was getting late, the IT guy in me couldn’t wait so I drove to Wal-Mart to fix this irritating, multi-month-long problem. Story short, the Netgear WGR 614v9 was up in no time. No sweat, no tears.
Is this a WildBlue problem? Apparently, some tech geeks are seeing a lot of problems with the new Cisco Linksys wireless routers. So maybe WildBlue is innocent. Whatever the case, for what it’s worth I hope at least a couple people stumble upon this blog and are saved some hours of life to do something more fun and interesting.
