Amped Wireless High Power Wireless-N 600mW Gigabit Dual Band Range Extender Repeater (SR20000G)

Subject: [#789209] wifi disconnects then comes back.12/12/2013Tech Support Personnel - Ricardo Concierge #127Thank you Ricardo for providing me with the right firmware update to suit my particular problem and instructions to upload it to your product.I would like to take a moment to thank the Amped Wireless Tech Support Team for providing such excellent customer service personnel in assisting me with my connection issue that I recently experienced.My problem was my Amped Wireless was dropping its wireless connection frequently and became frustrating to the point that I stopped using it for a month only using my service providers router(20Mbps)that had to support multiple devices, causing some painful lag with a son playing Xbox live the wife streaming movies along with everyone surfing the web. I decided to get my Amped Wireless up and running to improve things.With the support help I received from Ricardo I was able to get my Amped Wireless SR20000G working by performing a factory reset with the new firmware installed.After the upgrade I ran a saturation test by streaming 4 devices.I was able to support one laptop streaming music (by wireless), Wii streaming a Huluplus movie (by wireless) and Blu ray streaming a Huluplus movie(by Cat5 cable)all on the 2.4GHz band. My second laptop has dual band capability using the 5.0GHz band streaming music (by wireless).The only changes I made that I did not have prior to the firmware update was bumping the 2.4 channel width from 20MHz to 40MHz and upped my beacon interval from 100 to 300.The only problem I see (probably not a Ampted one but a Wii issue) is the Wii disconnects but not as much as when it was running strait from the router (by wireless) it actually runs 3x better after the changes were made.My test is maxing out all my computer stuff we could possibly use at any given time (except cell and a tablet), I ran it for a hour feeling confident that it is working without dropping connection to the router.I want to thank Ricardo for his other suggestions to increase speed performance, I plan on making his below config changes.1. Change the encryption on both the 5.0 and 2.4 security settings to WPA2 as that is the best for performance.2. Go into the advanced settings for the wireless bands, 5.0 and 2.4 and enable TX Beamforming and the 20/40 MHz coexists.He was also happy to answer my question about security with respect to running the Amped Wireless private network behind the routers own security WPA2.He replied with an answer I was looking for and helped ease any concerns I may have had.From Ricardo:"The router is probably already securing its Wireless network. The repeater does the same thing and encrypts its signal so that no one can connect to it unless they provide the password. WPA2 is just a more secure and faster encryption standard to use.Thank you for choosing Amped Wireless. If you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us".I am very happy with the Amped Wireless product; I think the firmware along with the changes in configuration to maximize speed was over all a big improvement!!!Thank you again Ricardo for your knowledge of product and professional support.Your Amped Wireless customer :)

Unusable for me. It brought my network down, with a routing loop. Had to unplug it to recover.Hardware is good, and holds much promise. It has a powerful radio. It has good antennas that are also detachable. It covers both bands.Unfortunately, the software was a big disappointment, even after installing the firmware upgrade from their website.You have to use a wired Ethernet cable for the initial setup. That's strange, since it's supposed to be a wireless device.The setup wizard is frustrating, after going through each page the router reboots (more waiting), and what's worse, it oftentimes gets stuck or repeats the same setup question again, or drops off the network entirely. I persevered for several hours, and eventually got through.There's 4 huge flaws in the design of this:1) You have to use the same channel for your extended network, as you do for the main network. This is unfortunate, and will slow you down, since you will be interfering with each other. I thought this unit had dual radios, evidently it doesn't, otherwise it could have used another channel, like the Netgear WN2500RP does.2) The 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands are isolated from one another. You can't repeat between them. The Netgear WN2500RP allows you to repeat one band onto the other band, which is handy for "upgrading" all of your old 2.4 Ghz devices up to 5 Ghz automatically, allowing you to take advantage of all the free space up there that has much less interference.3) It insists on running its own DHCP server by default. This is bad, because you should have only one DHCP server on your entire network, otherwise things will get really weird, as they compete with each other. Lock it down to a static IP address on your network, and turn off DHCP entirely on this repeater, as soon as you can.4) MAC addresses are not preserved. Instead, this repeater simply clones its own MAC address onto all of the devices that it repeats for! This is really bad, and will mess things up in your network. I had devices that could see the Internet but not each other, and devices that could see each other but not the Internet. It was chaos. This is the worst flaw, in my opinion.It brought down my entire network, with a routing loop. My main router blinked its lights as fast as it could go, as the packets flew around the network in an endless loop. I knew it was the Amped Wireless device that did this, because unplugging it instantly fixed the problem. Not good. I think there's some nasty bug somewhere, and it is probably related to the MAC addresses not being preserved properly.So, I can't use this repeater on my network, and will be returning it to Amazon shortly.DHCP (and broadcast traffic in general) is chaotic and unreliable, probably because of this MAC address problem. IPv6 support is questionable, as IPv6 isn't offered anywhere in the setup menus, but my devices that could do IPv6 mostly were able to continue doing it from behind an extended network, which is good. I'm surprised they wouldn't officially support IPv6.I can't recommend this repeater, because of these unfortunate design decisions. The radio transmitter is good, though! It's powerful, just how they advertise. Two stars instead of one star, just because of that.Also, the industrial design on this unit has 3 problems they should look at:1) The supplied vertical stand is flimsy, and doesn't secure well to the unit. Standing it up vertical is just asking for it to topple over.2) When stood vertical, the two antennas touch each other, and get in each other's way. The workaround is to reposition one of the antennas so it is no longer vertical, which looks kind of ugly (and probably doesn't work as well).3) The jack for the power supply is too close to the antenna jack, and so the power cord rubs up against the antenna, and gets in the way. It's annoying to access when unplugging it (and you need to unplug it to turn it off, because it doesn't have a switch).However, I do have some good things to say. This unit is very nicely packed, and has a nicely written setup sheet and card for helping you remember your settings. The technical support number is in the USA! That is a big plus these days. I try to support companies that go out of their way to help keep jobs in the USA.