Level Orange

Recently, after purchasing and installing the new iPod touch 2.0 update, I ran into a serious roadblock in trying to get a stable wi-fi signal with my home network. At first, everything seemed fine. I immediately downloaded the apps for AIM, Facebook and Twitter and they all worked as expected, but within a day or so, everything went dead. Safari couldn’t access web sites. Twitter couldn’t load new tweets. Nothing had changed in my router, nothing had changed in my iPod’s settings. I couldn’t figure it out.

After doing some searching and reading through Apple’s own support discussion forums, the problem started to reveal itself. My Linksys BEFW11S4 was a trusty old 802.11b router had served me well for the last several years. I bought it way back when Wireless-B was still relatively new and figured it would always be good enough for my purposes.

In fact, the only reason I bought a wifi-capable router was so that I could play games online with my old PlayStation 2 in the living room (and after that, my Xbox and Xbox 360) using a Linksys WET11 wireless bridge. And since I only had one device that required a connection, I didn’t even use any sort of security method for the network, instead choosing to disable all incoming access except for the WET11 itself.

That worked fine for years, but after getting the iPod touch last year, I figured with personal data now flying back and forth around my home, it might be best to turn on network security—namely, WEP—just as a precaution. I mean, I can’t have all my mobile porn social networking activity being snooped on by the neighbors, right?

However, after applying the iPhone/iPod touch 2.0 software update, it seemed that WEP was causing severe drops in signal and/or complete disconnects to anything web-related. Don’t ask me how, because I wouldn’t have a clue, but by all indications, something about a router that hadn’t seen a firmware update in over three years just didn’t sit well with the new 2.0 update. I also considered that it might be a matter of WEP vs WPA security. The BEFW11S4 supported WPA, but since it hadn’t seen any updates in years, I wondered if I had somehow created a “perfect storm” of networking disparity.

So, as a last-ditch effort before considering that something might have just gone plum wrong with my iPod, I did some research and decided to upgrade my home network with a new router, or more specifically, something that would support WPA security and be most likely updated and supported by Linksys in the foreseeable future. I chose the WRT54G2 for the Wireless-G speed, the enhanced WPA security, the familiarity I had with configuring Linksys products, and c’mon, just look at that sleek, sexy black design.

After a relatively painless swap, it turns out that my suspicions were correct. The iPod touch played nice with the new router, access was faster and everything was back to normal. Well, almost.

That Xbox 360 I had sitting in the living room called out to me later that day begging to be played, and as I booted it up and went to log on to Xbox Live, I hit a new dead end. As it turns out, the WET11 bridge doesn’t support WPA security. So here we go again…