New Rogers Gateway: Hitron CDE-30364

[FormerMember]

I think what you mean Gdkitty is that the modem portion works fine and I agree with that. If all the customer requires is a wired connection, then the CISCO works just fine. The wireless is flaky because of the built in router that causes the bad connections and dropped signals. It is because the built in router does not function properly that many customers are having the unit placed into bridge mode and then using their own router. But as a modem only, it is fine.

[Pauly]

IHR, yes ive heard of people complaining about wireless dropping, however once I setup my gateway to the correct channel, and wireless security, ive never had these issues reported by others. Maybe not everyone experiences these kinds of issues?

[Gdkitty]

Im not confused 🙂  But i think is a difference in terminology.

A modem, sends its info from itself, out to the next device (be it a computer, or in this case your own wireless router).

A ROUTER, itself, routes the information.  It takes, in this case, the information from the modem (weither one is built in or not) and then routes it, to the correct location on the network.  It can do this either wired, or wireless.

Many moons ago, before wireless really became prelivent, the first routers, were wired only.  Heck, they even were only 1 port.. litteraly, you did modem to router, router out to your own switch (it wasnt built in). 

I DO NOT have the cisco set in bridged mode.  I have it set in gateway mode, but with wireless off.  I then have it run out to my 3rd party wireless router, which has DHCP off.  Really in the end, my wireless router, is now just acting not as a router, but as an wireless access point.

I connect on my gaming laptop, wirelessly to the router/access point, then again, wired from there to the gateway.  I have never had a single connection drop on it (well, other then a power blip, when its rebooting :P).

So what i am saying.. is the ROUTER fuction alone, while in gateway mode, works fine.
Its the wireless function of these, that seems to be the sole problem.  The device can rout, etc fine, with no issues, but its the wireless that does the droping.

[EddieDZ]

I just picked up the Hitron modem on Wednesday. A few things: I've had the SMC D3 for a year and a half without a single problem, i only use wifi in my house with several devices and all would get great wifi signal and great wifi speeds as well as good range.

Upon picking up the Hitron and configuring it, the modem itself died after about 1 hour. All lights went off. Interesting. Took it back the next day  as it was night already. Second one is working so far, what i like about this new modem is the look of it and the GUI of the software, its easy and user friendly and looks nicer, the modem also does not get very warm like my old SMC did, koodos to that.

Wifi speed is still the same as it was before, no difference seen, however the only difference I do see is with the range. I can no longer go out to my back deck as the wifi signal is too weak to pick it up, and my back deck is only about 25-30feet from the mdn with only about 2 walls inbetween. I have also seen a difference with my PS3 which is also on wifi but only about 15ft from the modem, in the same room with direct line of sight and the PS3 wifi status shows a average of 85%-90% signal strenght, with my old SMC this would be locked all the time at 100%.

Not sure what this all means as i thought the wifi in this gateway was going to be better then the smc and cisco. Some neighbors moved in to the duplex next door to me at the same time so i dont know if that has anything to do with it or not. I've tried different channels. Im going to stick with it for a while and see what happens.

[Gdkitty]

Without giving away too much info, if your not comfortable with it...

What area/where do you live?  Just curious.. seeing where they seem to be enabling/allowing it.

[EddieDZ]

Moncton, NB

update- so far havent notice any major difference from my old SMC D3 to this new hitron other then the fancier looking hardware sitting on my end table hahahah. the wifi signal on my PS3 has slowly gotten back to normal, im averaging 95%-100% on wifi signal strenght now more consistantly. However upon further networking testing I have notice my ping overall has jumped up, maybe due to the built in router feature. my old ping was 95% of the time averaging 40ms to multiple servers on pingtest.net. Now im averaging 60-80ms ping to those same servers.. this is both on hardwire and wifi connection!. I havent found any other settings on the hitron to tweet that may help with ping so im stuck with it. Its caused my PS3 online gaming to lag more so then it used to, not sure if thats by coincidence or what, going to wait it out and see if any improvment happens.

one positive thing i did notice is that my modem is locked onto 6 downstream chanenls and 4 upstream channels 🙂 .. that never happened to with my SMC. Also as i mention before about the wifi range, one thing i notice is that though the range may be weak, the wifi speed itself seems to stay surprisingly high and consistance, i had my laptop as far from the modem as i could (while being in the house) and i dropped to about 3 out of 5 bars but my multiple speedtest still held strong at 15-19mpbs. thumbs up for that

[Gdkitty]

That's good to hear about the no drops compared to the others. Sucks about the ping though.

From what I have read, the plan is to switch the cisco and smc to do the 6 downstream 4 up, but requires the firmware updates to do so. Not sure if the recent smc update was for this or not.

[EddieDZ]

The recent SMC update was primary for two things: it encrypts the wifi out of the box so upon a factory reset the wifi is not "open" like before. the default SSID and password have changed also were the old default SSID was D3GN_SSID0 or something like that. The second feature is the added "guest access" SSID. the SMC3DGN is not capable of more then 4 downstream channel bonding, dont know if this is a technical hardware limitation on the modem or just on rogers side, i believe its hardware though, the Cisco DPC3825 however can lock onto 8 downstream channels but only in certain areas where its available.

I dont know about the cisco D3 but on this Hitron modem the wifi is 2x2 mimo, i dont believe the SMCD3 is a 2x2 mimo.

[Gdkitty]

Ah, thanks for the info. I'm not overly familiar with the smc myself. 🙂

[jlannen]

I just switched from the SMC to the cisco a week or so ago and everything is much improved. Better range, higher speeds and best of all my internet hasnt died once yet.  Wanted to get the Hitron at the time but it just came out so I could not, had planned on going back to return the cisco and get the hitron but I may just leave as is right now after reading this.

I have ultimate and on Wifi on my laptop I see close to 70 mbps and on my i pad III, android tabs  and GSIII   around 35 mbps (like to get those higher but cant see it happening) so I guess I shouldnt complain.