Later On

I had a bit of a struggle recently with my router and my Roku HDxr. I thought I’d explain what I learned, both for you and for my own later reference.

UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, I am here confusing 802.11 and 801.11 — and I am still confused and don’t understand wireless. Do NOT use this as a guide. You’re better off doing your own research.

WiFi devices nowadays follow one of three IEEE protocols: 801.11b, 801.11g, or 801.11n. From Wikipedia:

The 802.11 family includes over-the-air modulation techniques that use the same basic protocol. The most popular are those defined by the 802.11b and 802.11g protocols, which are amendments to the original standard. 802.11-1997 was the first wireless networking standard, but 802.11b was the first widely accepted one, followed by 802.11g and 802.11n. Security was originally purposefully weak due to export requirements of some governments and was later enhanced via the 802.11i amendment after governmental and legislative changes. 802.11n is a new multi-streaming modulation technique.

At the link is a table that shows how the bitrates have increased: 801.11n is faster than 801.11g, and 801.11g is faster than 801.11b.

My router is a TRENDnet TEW-633GR, and it can use any of the three protocols: n, g, or b. Generally speaking, it uses the fastest protocol a device supports.

The Roku comes in three models, only one of which (HDxr) uses the n protocol—the other two are limited to the g protocol.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. For security, The router allows the user to specify WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) or WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access). In either case, you enter a key in the router (by using your browser to go to the router via its IP address, which for this router is 192.168.10.1 (you enter that in the address bar of your browser as though it were a URL, and you get to tinker with your router settings). The TRENDnet menu has five main headings: Basic, Advanced, Tools, Status, and Help. Under Basic, if you click Wireless, you can (at the bottom) select the type of security you want: WEP, WPA-Personal, or WPA-Enterprise. If you select WEP, you see this explanation:

WEP is the wireless encryption standard. To use it you must enter the same key(s) into the router and the wireless stations. For 64 bit keys you must enter 10 hex digits into each key box. For 128 bit keys you must enter 26 hex digits into each key box. A hex digit is either a number from 0 to 9 or a letter from A to F. For the most secure use of WEP set the authentication type to “Shared Key” when WEP is enabled.

You may also enter any text string into a WEP key box, in which case it will be converted into a hexadecimal key using the ASCII values of the characters. A maximum of 5 text characters can be entered for 64 bit keys, and a maximum of 13 characters for 128 bit keys.

If you choose the WEP security option this device will ONLY operate in Legacy Wireless mode (802.11B/G). This means you will NOT get 11N performance due to the fact that WEP is not supported by 11N specification.

So, obviously, since I have a n-compatible Roku and since The Wife has an n-compatible netbook and an n-compatible laptop, we want to use WPA-Personal as the security. This allows the n-compatible devices to connect a n-protocol speeds, while devices that are limited to 801.11g can still connect, only at not such a high bandwidth.

This was all very confusing to me, but now things are working. So far.