802.11n blues

As his fellow-Twitterers know, Rory Cellan-Jones has been grappling all week with getting 802.11n networking to work in his home. He’s now written an entertaining blog post on his experiences. Sample:

So then I got in touch with a real expert – a man who works for one of the big router firms. He immediately diagnosed my problem – I’d put the wrong kind of security on. It turns out that WEP just doesn’t work with ‘n’ routers – or rather it does but it throttles them back to ‘g’ speeds. It only works at full speed if you have no encryption or use one of the WPA options.

So why on earth does the router company allow you to choose WEP? He explained that they’d originally shipped the shiny new routers without it but there had been a consumer backlash. My router man also confirmed that the 802.11n standard hasn't been finalised yet, so there’s the possibility that some bits of kit won’t work with others, even if theoretically they are both using 802.11n.

He got it to work btw — eventually.