BT Voyager 2110 Wireless - wireless router

...on my telephone line that BT initially kept blaming on my Netgear router (despite me having tried 2 of them), so I decided to buy an new router, this time based on the Broadcom 6348 chipset (reasoning for this later). As BT did a router based on this I thought I would make it harder for them to blame the product by buying one with their badge on it, so into my house came the BT Voyager 2110 wireless router.

This router comes ready ...
...SNR setting issued by the BT exchange. This allows me to get a higher sync speed than the BT would otherwise allow, and on troublesome lines it would also allow a higher SNR (and thus lower sync) to help rule out some problems. To do this you need a utitility freely available on the web called DMT (v8). This functionality was the main reason I wanted a Broadcom based router.

The reason I am using the router to lower my SNR (and raise ... more

I have a problem on my telephone line that BT initially kept blaming on my Netgear router (despite me having tried 2 of them), so I decided to buy an new router, this time based on the Broadcom 6348 chipset (reasoning for this later). As BT did a router based on this I thought I would make it harder for them to blame the product by buying one with their badge on it, so into my house came the BT Voyager 2110 wireless router.

This router comes ready for the newest ADSL2+ connections (Local Loop Unbundled providers like TalkTalk and Sky use ADSL2+ for faster than 8Mb connections) and has built in wireless supporting upto 125Mb depending on the wireless card in the PC. It also support encryption using WEP, WPA and WPA2 standards so is reasonable future proofed in that department too.

Setting up the router is very easy, although I was disappointed to note that setting (and future changing) of the ADSL username and password can be done without inputing a password. Although this makes for easier setup for users, it is in my mind a bit of a security risk. Other configuration changes do however require a username and password to be entered.

On my line the router syncs with the exchange at about the same speed as my old Netgear (DG834G) router. It does however seem to drop the line much easier when the errors build up - it appears to me that if it sees a large number of errors a second it will resync regardless of the SNR and attenuation. This means that it resyncs with the exchange much more frequently than the Netgear did.
On the plus side though, there is a facility in the Broadcom chipset to override the default SNR setting issued by the BT exchange. This allows me to get a higher sync speed than the BT would otherwise allow, and on troublesome lines it would also allow a higher SNR (and thus lower sync) to help rule out some problems. To do this you need a utitility freely available on the web called DMT (v8). This functionality was the main reason I wanted a Broadcom based router.

The reason I am using the router to lower my SNR (and raise my sync) is my line has an intermittant fault which causes the SNR to die totally (forcing a resync with the exchange). BT's standard fix is to raise the default (lowest) SNR to 15dB and turn on interleaving. Now I accept interleaving as it does help reduce the CRC errors I see on my line but the SNR doesn't work as I still see the drops. BTs faults teams have turned down my default SNR to 9dB but the automated systems at BT keep overriding them and turning it back up. Using DMT I have set my router to sync with a SNR of approx 8.5-9dB and see very little problems (except when I get this SNR dropping fault)

Wireless wise, my network card only supports WEP or WPA encryption so I have setup the router using WPA (it comes with WEP turned on by default which is a nice security feature). I have also enabled other security features in the router such as turning on MAC address filtering so only my known cards can access the router, disabling remote access and setting up the firewall as necessary for my network.

Also in the box are 2 BT ADSL microfilters (splitters). They are the trailing dongle style, supporting the lastest BT standards. On poor lines, using non standard filters it is possible to see improvements to sync speed and stability just from fitting these. 

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