Need help with wireless in a larger space

I've been looking online to find info regarding improving the wireless in our warehouse space but most info is for home or regular office.

We presently have a Netgear WGR614 v3 in an area with a bunch of offices but it keep going down especially when we we are maxing out the DSL connection (we are a studio and work with audio & video media and often have to upload and download large files around the world, usually with bittorrent.)

Part of our space is a warehouse area of about 1500 sq ft. that needs a strong signal as well but I've been told that our metal roof is causing problems with the signal. Would a router with the ability to connect remote antennas help?

Are the business routers from most companies really much better than the home ones?

Everyone in the space is wireless (802.11g) so it's important that the signal is consistent and strong.

Any help or links to sites that might help would be appreciated

Hi

Have you tried any high gain antennas connected to your access point?
Or a couple of directional antennas covering your workspace.
Looking at the default antenna that comes with your access point (2db) I think at lest a 9db antenna would make more of a difference (Try before you buy tho).

What are your staff connecting with laptops, or wireless pda's?

I don’t see how the router should be going down when your downloading large files, as it should easily handle any information coming over a DSL connection. Have you tried connecting to the Ethernet ports and seeing if the router drops out when your downloading?
Try turning on the event logging on your router. Do you have all the people connecting to the router on DHCP or specified IP addresses?.

As for the use of commercial access points, I don’t know much in that area.

Joe

You will prob find that the router is dying because the nat table is filling up, BT will do that, and some of the cheap nasty routers only store state for 127 or 255 connections, and UDP has a ridiculous long timeout on them.

If you are using azureus disable the distributed tracker and distributed DB plugins as those send lots of UDP, and limit your peer connections to 20-30ish and see how it goes.

Otherwise get a real router

I had a sittuation like yours, and how I fixed it was upgrading my internet connection. Because dsl does not have static IP usually drops down a lot, when its bandwith is being use at its full potential. In other words, the modem+router start updating its IP address, to gain more bandwith. Bitorrent stops the download, until you refresh the connection again. Having a metal roof top, also means that a lot of the upbeams are metallic, and that is also a problem. You may need to use a lot of AP, so the signal would be stronger.

Thanks everyone for your help.

I'm pretty sure I've decided to upgrade to the Linksys WRT54GL
so I can upgrade the firmware to DD-WRT which gives me more control of the router and maybe upgrade the antennas. It seems the cheapest route to go and still get good performance. I figure it'll also be a good learning experience.

Also thanks for the BT info. I'll assume that was the problem since it only went down when BT was running.

Hi there

Just a note that may help others in this situation. The WGR614 v3 has only one antenna and the problem can be in large warehouse type buildings made of steel and concrete, because of the amount signal reflections of walls and other objects, causing data corruption. If you have 3 or more computers communicating at once and you start to get some corruption and re-transmissions they can escalate and cause some routers to go very slow or even crash. One solution is to try a router with diverse antennas as these are more tolerant to situations where there are alot of reflections as the two antenna are at least one wavelength apart and the access point will be able to choose the best antenna to receive data on for each transmission.

good luck

Dale