N900 Central, slow/interrupted connections and best firmware version

Hi.

I’ve been suffering lately from frequent slow or interrupted connections (for example, some elements from complex pages won’t load or will take a long time to load; sometimes the CSS are affected and the result is a mess).

I was blaming my ISP (or some black hole router, so I tried tweaking things like the MTU, MSS, etc in my computer), until I tried connecting the computer directly to my FTTH router and all the problems went away.

The computer is connected by ethernet, but the mobile and tablet also suffer the same issues, so the problem affects both wired/wireless connections.

I’ve been trying to prevent my N900 from doing this. Disabling FasTrack Plus improved things a bit, but still not quite. Enhanced WMM is disabled too. I’ve tried to disable all the Application Level Gateway services, but made no difference at all. Parental Control has always been disabled. The SPI Firewall is also off.

I can’t see what other settings to try, so I was considering downgrading the firmware. It’s got the latest version (1.07.16).

Which is the best firmware version for a stable connection? I don’t care much about the extra features, as far as the wired/wireless connections and WAN work I’m fine. If the NAS works well too, then great, if not, I can extract the HDD and give it some other use.

Make sure to setup the unit with a static ip to get a more stable connection. Also, try changing the Ethernet cables.

The ethernet cables were fine; when I connected the computer and my FTTH router directly I used the same cables, with an ethernet coupler, and they worked just fine.

In case anyone is wondering, I went for the version that came in the CD included with the router (1.01.08, not available for download anywhere afaik) because I thought that quite possibly was the version with which the N900 was originally released and therefore - quite possibly too - had passed some more/better quality control tests than others. Or at least it was worth a shot.

And so far during these 4 weeks it’s been incredibly stable (at least with all the same fancy things disabled). The slow, frozen and interrupted connections were gone instantly. The only issue I seemed to have was with WPA2 authentication on the 5GHz band, for some reason it didn’t seem to work, but as only one of my devices supports 5GHz, I just disabled it and I’m only using 2.4GHz. Except from that, the WIFI connection has also been most stable than ever, while with the more recent versions I sometimes had to disable and enable the connections on the devices and sometimes even to restart the router. Even SMB access seems a bit snappier.