Can 54g handle 10Mbps BB?

ALLI · 12 Apr 2006 at 21:32

Might be a daft q I know, but I'm with telwest's 10Mbps package. I can't seem to get much more than 5 meg connection through wireless, but when I hook up the cable to the router it's fine.

Is there some setting I'm missing or am I being a plank?

Skiddley · 12 Apr 2006 at 21:45

What speed is your NIC actually negotiating to?

ALLI · 12 Apr 2006 at 21:57

full speed, 54Mbps.

always, excellent signal strength.

Vertigo · 12 Apr 2006 at 22:24

Wireless AP built into the router or separate unit?

benjo plz. · 12 Apr 2006 at 22:28

Erm of course it can. 10/8 = 1.25 MB/s, and with 54g, its about 5MB/s, so it's plenty.

ALLI · 12 Apr 2006 at 23:58

Vertigo1 said:
Wireless AP built into the router or separate unit?

it's a netgear wgr614

i was just having a moment of madness really. theres no explanation in my mind why when using wireless i can scrape 5Mbps yet as soon as I plug the cable in and disable the wifi card I then get full speed.

a friend of mine appears to have a similar problem - when wifi'ing he gets >7Mbps yet cabled full.

bizarro.

Skiddley · 13 Apr 2006 at 07:49

I presumed he was talking Mb\s (bits) in all cases. Just because theoretically it is supported, doesn't mean it will work in practice.

What form of encryption is running? WPA? WPA2? Have you tried disabling it temporially incase the router doesn't have enough grunt?

Skilldibop · 13 Apr 2006 at 10:34

Erm of course it can. 10/8 = 1.25 MB/s, and with 54g, its about 5MB/s, so it's plenty.

5MB/s is wishful thinking on encrypted 54G. OVerheads on encryption are big.

Ever seen the "show run" output of a Cisco? look at what happens to the paswords when you enable "service password-encryption"
The passwords get about 20-30% longer.

In wifi terms this means you'll lose a similar percetnage of your bandwidth to overheads. I'm not sure the exact percentages as Ciscos use MD5 hashing and WEP/WPA are different algorythms.

Kol · 13 Apr 2006 at 11:42

Skilldibop said:
5MB/s is wishful thinking on encrypted 54G. OVerheads on encryption are big.

Ever seen the "show run" output of a Cisco? look at what happens to the paswords when you enable "service password-encryption"
The passwords get about 20-30% longer.

In wifi terms this means you'll lose a similar percetnage of your bandwidth to overheads. I'm not sure the exact percentages as Ciscos use MD5 hashing and WEP/WPA are different algorythms.

Yep. Using my laptop, transferring a large file over wireless (connected at 54Mbps), FTPing to my xbox, I see an average of 2.1MB/s. With a cable, it increases marginally. The overheads are huge as Skilldibop said and I rarely see anymore than that.

benjo plz. · 13 Apr 2006 at 13:19

Skilldibop said:
5MB/s is wishful thinking on encrypted 54G. OVerheads on encryption are big.

In wifi terms this means you'll lose a similar percetnage of your bandwidth to overheads. I'm not sure the exact percentages as Ciscos use MD5 hashing and WEP/WPA are different algorythms.

Maybe, I get 5mb/s here, but thats SuperG (not much better), although it only needs to be above 2 or so for it to be fine with 10m/b NTL.

MajorPart · 13 Apr 2006 at 14:26

Mikol said:
I see an average of 2.1MB/s.

I see about that with PSK on, slightly more with it off.

Skilldibop · 13 Apr 2006 at 14:34

can also try using the adadpters own management software. The built in XP wifi stuff is pretty poor.
Other tweaks are check the router has the latest firmware etc and maybe check the aerials are nice and tight. Can if your really scraping the barrel put some arctic silver on the screw threads but that's really gaining .01 of decibels unless your aerials are really loose.

Alternatively try a mates adapter. The router may not be at fault here, data does go both ways.

NathanE · 13 Apr 2006 at 15:07

It'll work fine but you won't be able to saturate the 10Meg connection - even with an "excellent" signal. Wireless bit and packet rates fluctuate way too much for the liking of TCP congestion control.

Toytown · 13 Apr 2006 at 16:01

It'll work fine but you won't be able to saturate the 10Meg connection

Sure you can, i have a belkin pre-n router (but flashed with the linksys firmware) and using a belkin card, about 10 meters away i can get about 9.6Megabits of traffic whilst doing big downloads. If i put the cable in, its about 9.6 as well. My brother who lives in the same street about 50 meters away has a dlink pci card (with a small antenna) and gets on average about 2500Kilobytes (20Megabit) whilst downloading files from my FTP server.

This is with WPA/WPA2 encryption, using TKIP algorithms

benjo plz. · 13 Apr 2006 at 16:04

Toytown said:
snip

Pre-N isn't 54G.

Kol · 13 Apr 2006 at 16:09

MajorPart said:
I see about that with PSK on, slightly more with it off.

Good stuff, yeah, mine is WPA-PSK, using a WRT54GS. Glad to see it's about the going rate, as it were.

Clarkey · 13 Apr 2006 at 16:13

i've managed to saturate a 10mb connection using only an unencrypted 11b link, so i'd say 54g should do it with ease.

Skilldibop · 13 Apr 2006 at 16:20

Clarkey said:
i've managed to saturate a 10mb connection using only an unencrypted 11b link, so i'd say 54g should do it with ease.

how?

a maxed out 11meg B link at theoretical will get you 1.3MB/s which is barely enough. Realistically that's impossible.

benjo plz. · 13 Apr 2006 at 17:29

Hmm, B will just about do 700kb/s, no way could you max out a 10mb/s cable connection with it.