We use a DrayTek Vigor 2008 wireless ADSL 2 router at both The Frontier Group office and Berwick Manor. I was surprised and disappointed to see that at home my wireless network was performing especially poorly, with up to 40% packet loss and significant drop outs.

I investigated a few avenues, but because the MacBook Pro is so damn new there’s nothing I could find online to help me out. Coupled with the fact that things work fine at the office and you had one confused little gangster.

The first stop was to check out my old MacBook Pro, which is now Magdalena’s new MacBook Pro. Her wireless worked just fine and dandy, but at least that meant I could point the finger to my unibody badboy with confidence.

I upgraded the DrayTek’s firmware because the version I was using was from mid-2006. There have been numerous patches since then which claim to help with wireless connectivity. Magdalena’s laptop is almost 3 years old, so it was about the same age as the firmware - it made sense that it might play nicer, whilst mine was expecting something else.

The new firmware flashed fine but it did nothing to help my Mac. I fiddled around with the various wireless security options but even having no security didn’t change anything, and I was still dropping more packets than I could afford.

I did have success by locking the DrayTek to 802.11B only, instead of the B/G combo. I know, I know… the standard allows for a much slower throughput, but that’s not super important to me. I want nice, fast pings on my wireless network at home. When I transfer large files I jack into the wired network anyway, so it’s not going to be a limitation I can’t live with.

I went from this:

<snip>
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=17 ttl=255 time=42.394 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=18 ttl=255 time=44.301 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=19 ttl=255 time=9.830 ms
^C
--- 192.168.10.254 ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 14 packets received, 30% packet loss

… to this:

<snip>
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=454 ttl=255 time=4.426 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=455 ttl=255 time=4.422 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=456 ttl=255 time=3.667 ms
^C
--- 192.168.10.254 ping statistics ---
457 packets transmitted, 457 packets received, 0% packet loss