Interesting 802.11n discovery

Off the Exchange/Lync topic train but interesting enough this was for me to pass it on without writing about it.

After a long period of laziness and ignorance of my home network, I finally got tired of buffering issues when I stream HD videos I took on vacation and decided to do something about it. I setup Linksys WRVS400N knowing all my devices do support Wireless N including my XBOX360 where I will be watching those videos.

Since I can do Wireless N on all my devices, I decided to setup wireless as N-Only instead of mixed B/G/N. Once router was configured, I started with my laptop running Windows 8. As usual, it saw the new network, asked me for password and I thought that was it. Rarely it is though, isn't it? To my surprise, it could not connect to wireless. My Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN was perfectly capable of connecting to N, so why wouldn't it?

So I switched the router to G/N mixed mode and the laptop connected immediately. It certainly was something with Wireless N, but what was it?

After a bit of research, I found out that The IEEE 802.11n Draft prohibits using High Throughput with WEP or TKIP as the unicast cipher. While I was not using WEP (I had configured WPA security), I did happen to have TKIP as my cipher on WPA! I was now staring at the answer to my problem.

As they say, fix is 2 seconds once you find the cause of the problem. It took more than an hour to find the cause but once I did, it took me 2 seconds to switch my settings to WPA2+AES and all of my devices successfully connected!

Now on to my vacation videos… cheers. J

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  this confusion everyone has

• Anonymous
  August 31, 2012
  good find, going to check my wifi router settings now....