I’ve had my share of wireless routers and, quite honestly, none of them have worked very well for me. The radios in Linksys WRT54G units couldn’t emit their way out of a paper bag, third-party firmware such as DD-WRT seems to have on-going issues with the SIP (VoIP) protocol, and most recently my Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 decides to stop passing traffic every 10-14 days. For fun I installed DD-WRT v23 SP2 and v24 RC3 onto my Buffalo and they still haven’t fixed the SIP issue and strangely enough I can’t connect to LAN clients once my WAN connection starts working.

My father mentioned his D-Link DIR-655 has been reliable and we have a similar setup of Xbox 360s, Macs, and mobile devices. I gave it a shot but it’s too early to say how much better the DIR-655 will be. At the moment my MacBook Pro’s Airport meter is waffling low and high - never a good sign.

The point of my post… I couldn’t get my Nokia E61 connected to my “Mixed N and G” network using “WPA/WPA2 security” with “TKIP and AES” (the latter two being the default). The D-Link access point would come and go on the E61’s WLAN scanner and would not connect. I changed the security settings and it connected properly. For awhile at least.

Today it reverted back to not connecting. After more noodling it seems the E61 won’t connect to the D-Link when set to “Mixed N+G” mode so I changed it to “G-only” and it connects straight-away. VoIP with Truphone works as well. Edit: Unfortunately Devicescape stopped working but a manually created Access Point works fine. Devicescape started working again but it seems to have a mind of its own on when it will connect to the wireless AP.

This doesn’t address the silliness of owning a Draft-N access point which is forced to run at G-only mode and leaves two issues:

• What is different about Mixed N+G and the E61?
• Why did Devicescape give up the ghost?

I hope to find out over the next few days.

P.S.
In light of this, D-Link must be doing something right. My wife’s Thinkpad has never been able to connect to her company’s VPN with the Buffalo access point (yes, VPN passthru was enabled) but it’s working fine with the D-Link.

Related posts:

• Are router firmware hacks worth it?
• Nokia E61 as a wireless modem for your Mac
• Starting over with iSync and Nokia N75
• Debranded Nokia N75 firmware bugs
• Debranding the Nokia N75

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