Cable cleanup turns into network fiasco

My desktop is cluttered with peripheral equipment. All of the associated power supply bricks, power cords, USB and network cables that come with it are enough to fill a small basket with power strips at my feet. It's a ridiculous tangle - remember when Bluetooth was going to solve this?

Instead I'm always getting my foot hooked on some stray wire, tearing the RJ-11 jack right off the wall or cutting power to my monitor. Every once in a while I get fed up and re-groom the cables into a nice, neat mane running down the wall behind the desk. But things change, entropy takes over. The last straw came a few weeks ago when the dog woke with a start - she had been asleep at my feet - ensnared herself in the tangle of wires and bolted in a panic. If you don't use computers much and want to know what this feels like, just have someone yank the wiring harness out of your car.

Something needed to change. But what? I had an idea. In a bid save some desk space, eliminate some wiring clutter and save energy (each device uses about 5 Watts), I decided to replace my wireless router and cable modem with a single, integrated Linksys unit I had lying around. Things haven't been the same since.

Everything seemed to work fine at first, so I triumphantly returned my Time Warner-issue cable modem for a $1 per month credit. That was my first mistake.

Asking for trouble

After about a week after deploying the cable gateway I realized that I had set up the device with WEP, a weak security mechanism that can be easily defeated by your average college student. I had set the unit up quickly, without paying too much attention. 

A quick peek into the setup firmware confirmed my fears: The unit didn't support WPA or WPA2, and no update was available. My office is next to a college and I am surrounded by college housing within range of my office. Not a good situation, I thought. So, reluctantly, I folded down the rabbit ears on the Linksys unit, turned off the wireless feature and hooked up a separate Belkin wireless router with WPA2 security (I had searched for another integrated unit, without success. Why doesn't anyone make these anymore?).

Now I was back to three devices. What was worse, the cable gateway was three times the size of the cable modem I had returned. But hey, at least I was getting that $1 credit off my monthly cable bill for using my own cable modem. Right.

Unfortunately, there was another festering problem. Shortly after installing the wireless gateway I began experiencing intermittent problems with my Vonage voice over IP telephone service that were getting less inter and more mittent. My phone plugs into a Vonage voice over IP router device, which connects to the wireless cable gateway so that my calls can be routed through the Internet. I was suffering packet loss problems. That resulted in recurring dropouts during calls that lasted several seconds. In some cases the people I was calling couldn't hear me at all; at other times the calls were simply dropped. What's worse, the problems, which had been occasional at first, were now occurring with alarming regularity.

According to Vonage, my packet loss rates were exceeding 8% during these little bouts. We checked everything, tried all of the settings, and in the end it turned out to be the Linksys gateway - and me. Apparently, some of the older units were a bit squirrelly. They also had a tendency to overheat, and mine was very warm - probably because, in a bid to free up more desktop real estate, I had neatly stacked the Belkin and Vonage devices on top of it.

After unwinding the nest of wires, I separated the Linksys unit from the rest of the mess and reset everything. Finding no relief, I finally chucked the Linksys unit, trekked back to the Time Warner office and returned with a vendor-issue cable modem.

Now everything seems to work fine, but my desktop looks like this:

I am sure there is a better way. But for $1 a month and the 10 square inches of desk space I might save I'm not sure it's worth the bother.