Wireless Network Question? I Need Help...

[El Mahdi]

Okay all you resident computer geniuses, I've got some questions.

I have a wireless-g network running from an AT&T wireless gateway connected to DSL (at the highest available speed for my area), and anywhere from two to three laptops running off of it. I can easily run all three computers on the internet at the same time, with no noticeable slowdowns or anyone getting kicked off. But, as soon as one of the computers starts downloading or streaming anything (a file, movie/tv show, music, radio station), the other computers get kicked off the internet (they still have a network connection, but Internet Explorer will display a "Gateway error" when going to a new page, or currently viewed pages will just freeze). The kicked off computer will need internet explorer shut down and restarted multiple times before a simple webpage like Google can be reached - and even then, will randomly get kicked off until the download is complete.

I'm probably going to switch from AT&T to cable internet anyways (in my area, cable has faster available speeds than AT&T does, for the same basic price I'm paying now, and AT&T has had quite a few area outages, and significant slowdowns/dropouts at peak times).

So, my questions are:

Is it the modem portion of the gateway that's kicking me offline, or is it the router portion?

Is it because I'm using a cheap AT&T gateway?

Do I need to have a seperate modem and run two seperate wireless routers off of it (two wireless networks) in order to avoid this problem?

How do I fix this?


Help me ENWorld. You're my only hope...

 

[Janx]

Have u got AT&T Uverse or AT&T DSL. technically, they are VERY different and seperate divisions of AT&T even though they both use DSL.

what speed package do you have?

What speed does speedtest.net tell you that you have?

on each PC, open up a command prompt (Start->Run, type CMD and press ENTER)

type IPCONFIG to see your IP address and that of the gateway
ping the gateway (PING X.Y.A.B) where X.Y.A.B is the IP address of the gateway
Ping google.com to prove you can get to the internet

Do this test before you start the download and during the download when there's a problem

If you lose your IP address, that PC won't be able to do anything
If it keeps its IP address but can't ping the gateway, then your gateway has gone wonky
if it can't ping google, (but the rest works), then your local network is fine

Odds are good, your router is giving all the bandwidth to the downloader PC. The rest of the PCs are starved, so they return an error that they can't reach the gateway.

If you connect all your PCs via wire (not wi-fi) can you repeat the results?

On my u-verse, I can surf the web on my iPhone or PC while streaming a netflix on my xbox. The xbox is the only wired device.

 

[El Mahdi]

...Odds are good, your router is giving all the bandwidth to the downloader PC. The rest of the PCs are starved, so they return an error that they can't reach the gateway.

Thanks for the help and info Janx. And this is what I think too. I've got DSL (Uverse isn't available in my area) at the highest speed available in my area (which I think is 6Mbs, but I'd have to look it up). Usually, when I've run speed tests I'll get around 4 or 5. But I just ran it now and got 6.09Mbs, so that's running pretty good. We never have a problem with the downloads though, it's just any other computer when we are downloading. I haven't actually looked to see if the other computers are losing their ip or not, but I don't think they are as all I have to do is exit IE and then just start it back up again (sometimes it has to be done multiple times, but it's still the same thing). I've also noticed though that if IE isn't shut down, but my connection comes back, the gateway still won't let me access the page I was trying to reach when I recieved the error. It will tell me "Success - you must restart your browser to view the page", or something to that effect.

If it is just the router causing the problem, is there anything I can do in the gateway set up to change that. It's set for maximum speed right now (56mbs). Does that mean that it will allow one computer if it's downloading to use up all the bandwidth? Should I set that to a lower amount to limit any one computer from using too much? Or is it just a crappy router (it's the 2wire wireless gateway provided by AT&T), and there's really nothing to be done about it (except get a better one)...?

Thanks again for the help.

 

[Janx]

I've also noticed though that if IE isn't shut down, but my connection comes back, the gateway still won't let me access the page I was trying to reach when I recieved the error. It will tell me "Success - you must restart your browser to view the page", or something to that effect.

this part of your reply concerns me.

web browsers don't product any kind of "success - you must restart your browser..." type message in their page space. Browsers are stupid.

Any kind of content like that is coming from something that is hijacking/filtering page requests.

I've seen that sort of thing when plugging a netgear router into a 2wire router. 2wire actually detected it, and sent a page to my browser to do a reconfiguration for the 2wire router.

I hate that kinda monkey crap. Browsers are dumb terminals. Routers pass packets. sniff my packets for http requests and interfere with my page requests again...


Since you have a DSL modem, and a router (2wire, from AT&T), buy a $50 router (dlink, netgear, pick your poison), and swap out the 2wire. if things get better...