It seems that the reason for the slow service could be that the switching station at our tiny town's hookup is oversubscribed. When we first went from 1 mb to 7mb, we got good service. As time went by, we slowed back down. A friend of mine now cannot even get a line , and is told he must wait until someone abandons one.
The bigger problem with our service, out here on the farm, is lightning. It often strikes our line and carries to our equipment. We have lost over half a dozen fuses and modems, two phones, and once it blew the fuse, jumped it, blew the modem and took out my motherboard. The hard drive was not right and I replaced that within a year. The optical drive too.
After that, I quit using ethernet cables and went exclusively with Wi-Fi. That way, only the junky modems supplied by Frontier were at risk, which they will replace at no extra charge. Since my wife works on-line from home, I couldn't wait for a replacement, so I bought several cheap back-ups from e-Bay.
Then I built her garden office. The Wi-Fi no longer reached. We got the ASUS and set it up in my place using the 7550 as a modem. That worked but was not strong, so a friend gave us an extender he was not using. This was pretty good, though still burpy.
Come New Year, we started to lose signal. At first we could fix it with a hot re-boot. Then I started using my spare modems. The Wi-Fi went out on one so I got an exterior ethernet cable and ran it to her office, which she likes because it is more reliable than the Wi-Fi ever is. Various functions on different modems gradually gave out. Sometimes they would bridge to the ASUS, then they would not.
So Frontier finally showed up. They replaced some wires and components and gave us a new D2200D, and told me I could use it both for Wi-Fi at my place and as a modem for the ASUS, which is now over at my wife's office.
I found a video showing how to put the ASUS in AP mode as you suggested. Looks pretty straight forward. But I have already put the extender over at her place, without using the ASUS at all, and things are working well. This way we are back to only having the D2200D exposed to lightning, and we each have an ethernet hook-up for when we need a better signal, but can un-hook when there are storms (I can also unhook the phone line itself, but we haven't had a strike in a couple of years now, though we have had six in one year, and one gets lazy). If we need it, I will try using the ASUS in AP mode.
Hope I didn't bore you, but you seem the type to enjoy a good story. Thank you very much for all your help.
By the way, I am also a Michael.
Yours, Michael Seno
