Belkin: Slow Browsing Fast Downloading

Dear Geeks,

me and my flatmates are having major problems with our Belkin Wireless Router (F5D8236-4 v3).

The download speeds are fast (c. 1.5Mbps is pretty standard) but browsing is painfully slow. All sites take ages to load, and often time out or we get the "Server Not Found" message, and have to click refresh. Once the site does eventually load, it is often a kind of low-fi HTML version of the site with just old-fashioned hyperlinks in underlined blue font.

This is happening on all computers in our network (2 Windows 7 computers, one iPad, one Ubuntu and one Mac). When connected via cable, we see the same kind of problems but sped up thousand-fold. We can always load google very quickly, but other sites need to be refreshed a few times before they (very quickly) load. Either a site loads very quickly or not at all.

We've tried disabling the firewall on the router, disabling the security on the router (we now just have a fixed list of MAC Addresses which are allowed access), firmware upgrades plus all the usual nonsense about resetting the router and the cable modem etc. etc.

We're not newbies, we know what we're doing, so please no "do you have bittorrent running?" or "have you checked for malware"-type answers. It's not about the browser and it's not about the operating system or the wireless card (I know this since all computers are suffering identical problems)

Does anyone who knows what they are talking about recognise these symptoms?

Many thanks,
Rob

 

Welcome!

I was thinking DNS server but since you know what you are doing and if your settings have you on the same DNS servers for both wireless and wired, that's a no.

Where are you located?

 

Frankfurt, Germany.

Actually, I'm going to tentatively say we've sorted the problem out.

We switched from mixed mode (d, g & n) to just n and suddenly everything sprang to life.

No idea what the router does in this mixed mode but it's clearly nothing sensible.

Any ideas as to why mixed mode was so ruinous for us? (I'd don't really know enough about how the different protocols work, but I'm assuming some kind of switching between protocols was going on, and messing up packet transfer or something)

Thanks for all your time and thoughts!
Rob

 

Frankfurt is a great city. I lived in Heidelberg for a year.

When you are in mixed mode on a home router, the router will work in the slowest protocol for all devices. The router is not capable of working in b (or g) for one device and n for another device concurrently. There are enterprise level routers that can work in various protocols.

I don't know if this is related to the severe symptoms that you experienced. If you have WPA2 encryption and a b device trying to connect, that might cause some issues but what you were experiencing was extreme.

Glad you worked it out, thank you for sharing your solution.

 

Hi, no worries. Nice to have found a forum where people have a clue what they're talking about! Es könnte sogar sein, dass Sie meine Probleme verstehen würde, wenn ich sie auf Deutsch beschreibe! (That's hoping you learned a bit of German in your year in Heidelberg. If not, there's always Google Translate!)

Best,
Rob

 

Ich habe Deutsch gelernt, aber ist sehr lange her. Ich kann wenig Deutsch schreiben.

I wrote that without looking it up so it is probably worse than the google translator.