Linksys E4200: Retrospective
I just recently retired my WRT54G in favor or a Wireless N Router. I ended up going with the Linksys E4200 for a number of reasons.
First of all, it’s a high performance router, and so far it’s lived up to that expectation. What do I mean by a high performance router?
It’s capable of handling 450 Mbps on the 5GHz band.
We’ll get to the band in a second. This is going to be extremely useful for me later on when I start setting up a NAS in my house to stream content.
Secondly, it’s a dual band router. What exactly is a dual band router? It’s pretty simple actually.
The router has the ability to host two networks (3 if you include the guest network): one on a 5GHz band, and another on a 2.4 GHz band.
Now, there are a couple catches here. First, this router is a true dual band router. What I mean by that is that it can run both bands simulataneously. If you’re in the market for a new router, you have to keep this in mind because you could be looking at a router that says it’s dual band, but when you bring it home, it can’t run them both at the same time, you have to choose which one to roll with.
For me, I have to have both bands up at the same time, which brings me to the second catch. If you have devices (PCs, IPods, IPhones, Androids, etc.) then it’s likely that some are going to run on Wireless-G and some have Wireless-N. In my household, most of the devices run on Wireless-G, and I have a couple that can run Wireless-N.
Here’s the catch. If you have a Wireless-N capable router and you have devices that are connecting to it via Wireless-G and Wireless-N on the same band, then the router has to choose the lesser of the two, which means everyone on that band is stuck on Wireless-G. This goes for all routers, by the way. This is where the two bands come into play. If you have two bands, you can set one band up to run Wireless-N (5 GHz), and you can set up the other to be Wireless-G (2 GHz).
This brings me to the first complaint that I have about the E4200. When I originally set up the router, I assumed that the router would be configured out of the box to handle the exact scenario that I described previously. However, what I came to find out was that my router, out of the box, was configured in some kind of Mixed Mode setting for both bands. This wreaked havoc on my network for a day or two because I didn’t realize what was going on, and chalked it up to Comcast screwing with my internet again (they have a tendency to do this). However, after sitting down for a second and thinking about it, I decided to go digging around in the settings and that’s when I discovered the mixed mode issue.
This wouldn’t have normally been a problem, except for one thing:
I have a couple of devices at home that are Wireless-N but they only operate on the 2.4 GHz band.
This caused a war to ensue on the router between my G devices and my N devices, the winner being no one. Long story short, I ended up doing a manual set up on my router, where the 5GHz band was configured to run only Wireless-N and the 2.4 GHz band was configured Wireless-G only. Why did I do it that way? Because Wireless-G devices can only operate on 2.4 GHz band, and the devices that I have that only handle Wireless-N on the 2.4 band automatically negotiate down to Wireless-G when connecting to the router on 2.4 now, which is what would happen to them anyway.
Once I did that the war ended and now everything is playing nicely together. There has been one other snag along the way, but I’ll save that for another post.
I have the e3000 and i love it. Its so fast, and the simultaneous dual band is definitely a requirement. Have you looked into dd-wrt or tomatousb? Im running ddwrt.
Yeah man, when I was rolling with my WRT54G I was seriously considering putting dd-wrt or tomato on there, but my model wasn’t compatible with them. It would be really cool if I could load up one of those on my 4200. Do you get bandwidth usage metrics on ddwrt? I’d love to see how much throughput my router is seeing.
[...] that but the price tag on the sucker was only like $14, which I thought was amazing. Not until I upgraded my router did I realize the error of my ways. It’s in the bands people, the bands will get you every [...]
Nice blog, wish I had find this before spending 3 days tinkering with my shiny new E4200. Just a comment on setting up 5GHz wireless N only and 2.4 GHz on G only. I did the exact same setup as you did (two seperate SSIDs for 5 GHz & 2.4 GHz). However I was only getting 54 Mbps max. on 2.4 and 270 Mbps (sweeet) on 5. Then I changed the 2.4 to mixed mode (from BG only) and now I am getting 117 Mbps on 2.4 (on wireless N capable NIC but which only works on 2.4 band). Thought you might want to try this.
The mixed mode on the 2.4 GHz band works fine if you have devices connecting all on Wireless-N, but once you have a device that’s Wireless-G connect to it the router will downgrade the band to only G capable speeds. The device itself may report that it can get higher speeds, but the router will never transmit past the highest G speed it can do. Also, I had a lot of issues with having a variation of G and N devices on the 2.4 band. In the end I decided to keep my 2.4 G only so I can be sure that the connection is up all the time, and if I want higher speeds then I just upgrade whatever G device I have up to the N (putting them on the 5 GHz band)
I know this post is from 6 months ago, but it just helped with a problem I was having with my E4200 so it felt appropriate to post a thank you.
For some reason all my devices that traditionally connect to my G-band signal stopped cooperating. Oddly enough the laptops had no problem connecting to the N-band signal. All of my googling efforts kept specifying problems connecting to N-band – not my problem. This post pointed me in the right direction.
Thanks for this one.
Chris, I’m glad the post was a help to you!