Gone through multiple N routers trying to find one that works?

Well heres the issue... my dad and I are trying to upgrade our network to wireless N so we have been trying various open source supported routers to find one that works... they all do not transmit at the full or near 300Mb/s right now i am on a Netgear WNR3500L and I have tried both dd wrt and tomato and can just not get n speeds...whats the deal?! I have read nearly every thing google can come up with when it comes to trying to solve the issue....

 

300mbps is the speed the router connects to the client- not the actual throughput. 300mbps routers with good signal can achieve up to 100mbps of actual throughput.

What's the speed your devices connect to the router?
What are the devices in question? There are 802.11n cards that are capable of only 150mbps- that would be one possible reason.

Did you set security to WPA2+AES? It has to be that in order for 802.11n to work.
You have to set channel width to 40MHz as well. With 20MHz channel width you can get only half or the speed meaning-again- 150mbps.

 

yep have it in wpa2+aes only mode.... I am testing connections with my envy with its intel 6200 and my netbook which has some kind of brodcom card but does support 300mb as I have seen it hit that at my friends house... maybe im thinking that the router is going into sleep mode because when I start copying files the speeds starts fluctuating

 

No- router is not going into sleep mode.
What about 40MHz channel width?
At what speed are you actually connected to the router?

Are you using a wireless channel that's (reasonably) free of traffic?
Use inSSIDer to check that and adjust a wireless channel accordingly.

 

Isn't int the final specification of N on the 2.4 band to achieve the 300 mbits link requires a channel that isn't overlapped by other active channels in use

An approximate example is using inssider graph, your curve must not overlap other curves.

 

its locking itself to 72Mb/s

 

How far away are you??

Try this, stay within 15 feet of clear line of sight of the wireless ap.

 

72mbps is one stream at 20MHz.
First switch channels to 40MHz on the router (third time I write this).
This should bump the speed up to 150mbps

Are you using Intel 6200 for this test?

 

i am 3 feet in front of the router.... and yes this is my 6200... I have been on 40mhz.... could this be another defective router

 

No- it's always the settings.

72mbps is impossible with 40MHz channel as far as I know so there's one more option.
Go to device manager and check advanced settings for Intel card.
Intel used to have a setting there that allowed 20/40MHz channel setting. That may be limiting you.

 

tried that already and im still on 72Mb/s the router is showing the slower speed to which is odd...

 

Could you please provide a screenshot of basic and advanced wireless settings pages on the router?
BTW why is TX power set to 40mW? I thought the default was 71mW (although I may be mistaken on this one)

 

Weird it kept defaulting to 40 so I set it up to 70...

 

OK. Let's try this- set the wireless channel to 6 and try both "lower" and "upper" control channel. Second thing to test- main channel to 1 and control channel set to "lower".

Channel width set to 40MHz all the time.

You may want to reboot the router before and after the test just to be sure that the connection will be re-negotiated properly.