I hear lots of love for firmware version 1.15, so when I recently purchased two DGL-4500's (both A2 H/W, one from NewEgg, one from CompUSA), I upgraded from the factory installed 1.14 FW to 1.15.
I do a lot of online gaming and video calls over Skype. For the most part, 1.15 was golden, but I did notice the following:
1) A high number of wireless errors (amounting to about 10% of the total number of packets TX+RX), especially in the router that's in a crowded wireless area (around 16 other A/P's visible).
2) Wireless restarts, which would occasionally caused dropped video calls in Skype. These usually only happened during Skype calls, typically every 20 minutes, with call drops occurring roughly every 90 mins or so.
Other than that, transfer rates were high (over 10MB/s on the internet, roughly 4 times what I was seeing with my prior Linksys routers) and online gaming (Xbox Live) worked phenomenally, no connection issues on my side. I have never had a random router reboot at either location.
Given the low risk of trying 1.22NA firmware since I am able to downgrade it (thanks to someone on another site), I decided to go for it.
Here are my results so far (very early).
1) Wireless errors in the crowded area are now down from 10% to about 0.5%, much improved in 1.22NA. These always accumulated rapidly, so despite the approximate 1 hour uptime so far, it's definitely improved.
2) No wireless restarts in Skype yet, but too early to judge. I'll post back in a couple of days.
[update]
1) After 24 hours, wireless errors are about 1% of all packets received vs the 10% I had with 1.15. It should be noted that these errors only occurred with 1.15 in a crowded wireless area (more than 16 nearby access points as reported by Netstumbler)
2) Still no wireless restarts in Skype after more than 8 hours of video calls on 1.22 vs. 3 per hour with 1.15.
3) Bandwidth is not degraded at all with 1.22 vs 1.15. Effective wireless throughput is about 10% higher on average, most likely due to fewer errors in my crowded wireless area.
How about anybody else out there? How does 1.22 work for you, especially if you've been on 1.15?
I should note that I took the conservative approach to upgrading the firmware, resetting the router to the default config and upgrading its firmware through a sole wired connection (everything else off), manually reconfiguring all settings after installation.
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Topic: Comparison FW 1.15NA vs 1.22NA (Read 9689 times)