Wireless routers, repeaters and AOL

There are times when I loathe AOL and times when I really, really loathe AOL.

Today falls squarely into the latter category, and it’s no surprise that some people refer to the company as AOHell.

I was asked by a friend to keep an eye out for a cheap wireless access point, that could be used as a wireless repeater. A repeater basically extends the range of your wireless router, and is very useful in houses that have lots of walls/distance between the router and the computer wanting access.

Setting the router and repeater up was relatively painless, and everything seemed to be going fine, until we did a power down and reboot, to simulate a power cut etc. The router then refused to connect to AOL, constantly coming up with the message LCP down. Not being able to access the internet, we couldn’t search for solutions, and my friend was getting a little stressed so we called it a day, while he called AOL tech support, and I went home for dinner.

Just as I got home I remembered that AOL uses a totally different MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) figure to every other ISP I’ve ever seen. If you don’t have the routers etc set to 1400 it can cause major problems, one of which seems to be refusal to log-in.

By the time I got back to my friend, the AOL tech support had shown him how to set the MTU to 1400, but said that the router being powered down would cause it to reset again. Doesn’t sound very plausible to me, but then AOL has always been a pain in the ****. Special settings, special software etc. It’s one saving grace was it’s free tech support, but that seems to have changed now that they are owned by Carphone warehouse, unless you pay extra for AOL talk.

Hopefully my friend won’t have any more problems, and the repeater will enable the other computer to surf the internet without getting constant drop-outs.

At least until the power goes down