I have broadband cable internet connection from Comcast, who gave me a Motorala SB5120 modem. It works fine when connected directly to my laptop computer (Vista Home Premium) using an ethernet cable. When I sought to put a wireless router in between, all hell broke loose.
The router is a Netgear Wireless N RangeMax Dual band router, capable of sending signal at 2.4GHz and 5 GHz simultaneously, and offers many different types of encryption including WEP, WPA-PSK, WPA2-PSK (AES) and a combination of the latter two. Since my Vaio laptop is capable of receiving signals at 5GHz, I chose that option to receive interference free signals.
The signal flow is such:
Cable -> SB5120 -ethernet cable-> Netgear -ethernet cable-> laptop;
Or after configuration:
Cable -> SB5120 -ethernet cable-> Netgear –wireless– laptop.
The problem is occurring in both these scenarios. Even after successful connection, where the Netgear Router has cloned the laptop’s MAC address, it is receiving the proper IP from cable modem, the cable modem disconnects every 15-30 minutes on its own, and then reconnects after about 5-10 seconds. All the lights go off except the PC activity light, and then start coming back one at a time from top to bottom (This sequence would normally happen if the power to the modem is cut and then restored).
As a result, I am getting very slow speed of connection to almost any web page. As long as the modem remains operational, the webpage load fine, but once it starts to disconnect at regular intervals, the pages slow down to a crawl and then the browsers don’t load any page any more, until the modem comes back up.
When I completely disconnected the Netgear router from the equation, and connected just the modem to the computer as before, I had no problem getting on the internet and staying connected. Can someone please offer some constructive suggestions about my problem? Has anyone else had the same issue?
