Improving Performance on your 2Wire 2701HGV-E Gateway Home Portal

I signed up SingTel’s MIO Plan (Residential Line, Internet & Mobile phone) almost 2 years ago and was given a 2Wire 2701HGV-E Gateway. I was a very happy user after i finally shook off starhub’s laggy hub, but there are always pros and cons to every story. Never will i go back to starhub, i’ve suffered soo much there.

In this post, i will be exploring some settings i used to improve the performance of the 2Wire device that SingTel provided. However i will not talk about adding more devices to compliment the network.

Problems

There are problems existing in this model causing instability and frequent disconnections while getting on the internet. Here are the problems:
1. Local device’s DNS service is faulty
2. Device is not capable of running/supporting WPA/WPA2 encryption modes other than WEP, at stable
3. Device heats up easily
4. Device is incapable of maintaining constant ping of 1ms/<1ms while connecting via LAN RJ-45
5. Device is still frequently disconnecting my pages, Webpages not loading, MSN frequently disconnecting

Solutions

These are some tweaks i made to improve the performance of the device, since i had to be stuck with it (in view of high electricity cost in Singapore),

1. Local device’s DNS service is faulty.
Solution: Change DNS Settings on your laptop/desktop/iPhone to external DNS servers, either one can be used or concurrently used:
– SingNet’s DNS servers, 165.21.100.88 / 165.21.83.88
– Google Public DNS, 8.8.8.8 / 8.8.4.4
* note that, this setting may need to be removed if you face problems connecting to other wireless networks such as, Wireless@SG

2. Device is not capable of running/supporting WPA/WPA2 encryption modes other than WEP, at stable
Solution: Just keep to WEP. or switch to WPA/WPA2-PSK,
However follow the settings according to the picture (Wireless Settings) attached below. You can choose 802.11b if you want longer range.

3. Device heats up easily.
Solution: Ventilate it or ignore it, i actually put my router behind a desktop, although more heat actually results in slower performance. Ironic.

4. Device is incapable of maintaining constant ping of 1ms/<1ms while connecting via LAN RJ-45.
Solution: Similar to Solution #3 & #5. There are hardly any ways around this, but it shouldn’t pose as a large problem.

5. Device is still frequently disconnecting my pages, Webpages not loading, MSN frequently disconnecting
Solution: Disable all Firewall (Advanced Settings), Attack Detection.
Solution #2: Tweak UDP Timeout to 1-5 Minutes, and TCP Timeout to 720 Minutes. It reduces the need for your router to maintain a list of existing connection. After this was set, the router showed significant improvements. See picture below (Configuring Services).
Solution #3: Set your Internet Proxy to proxy.singnet.com.sg port: 8080

There you go. Please spread this information to other users who are facing the same problems.
Thanks! :)

Click to enlarge the images

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1 Comment »

  1. […] Improving Performance on your 2Wire 2701HGV-E Gateway Home Portal | byon's blog – my daily rant! try changing to WEP if you're using WPA/WPA2 __________________ […]

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