Low wireless speed

litrelord

litrelord

litrelord

Associate
Joined
26 Sep 2003
Posts
63
Hi,

I’ve just recently been set up on O2 and have a healthy 18 meg sync speed. When I’m plugged in to the router using Ethernet I get around 1.8MB/sec throughput yet over wireless it drops to 900-1000KB/s (both speedtest.net & Giganews downloads).

I’ve set the router and the laptop to both use G only and the signal strength is always showing as excellent so I can’t see why there would be such a high level of degradation. I ran the TCP optimiser tool and made sure everything was set in there but it’s made no difference. There’s also another laptop in the house which connects at exactly the same speed.

I know this is still a very good speed but it’s annoying paying for something you’re not receiving.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Nick
 
Thanks for the reply.

Will check it out when I get home. It's a very large drop to happen because of encryption though isn't it? I did try it with WEP instead of WPA and that didn't make any difference but perhaps none at all will make the difference. Will cross that bridge if I come to it though.
 
litrelord said:
I know this is still a very good speed but it’s annoying paying for something you’re not receiving.
Click to expand...

Technically you are receiving the service you're paying for, it's just the gap between the router and the laptop that's causing the drops in speed. What kind of router is it you have? Try changing the wireless channel/frequency it broadcasts at, I doubt that the encryption would have anything to do with speed drops like this (but try it without encryption as well if the channel change doesn't work).
 
Simple answer - use ethernet.

You're really pushing wireless G at 18mbit and it's a speed you'd only obtain under the best of circumstances. An alternative would be to get a wireless N access point and card.

(another alternative is to make sure your wireless card is the same manufacturer as the router you're using)
 
I've tried changing the wireless channels and also with no security on it. Taking off security made a small improvement but only an extra 100k/s. The channel changing had no effect except for one channel where I couldn't connect at all.

I guess I hadn't considered the actual expected throughput between the router and the card being as low as this. Never had a need to transfer so quickly before.

May invest in a wireless N setup but will probably downgrade the package for now.

Thanks for all the help.
 
Unless you have a really poor connection, it sounds like perhaps interference/packet loss, something that replacing your stuff with 802.11n stuff is unlikely to fix.

What speed is your wireless adapter actually connecting at? And at what signal strength?
 
Hi,

it sits almost constantly on excellent signal strength and says it's 54mbps. I've run ping tests from the laptop to different servers and they show no packet loss. Perhaps this may not be an accurate test for this though so if there's a better way to see this let me know.

It could well be inteference as there are about 8 or so wireless networks that show up. Electrical inteference I can rule out unless it's caused by the lights as there's often not much else switched on. The only other thing is we're on a busy road but I didn't think that would make much of a difference.

Because the speed level is so similar despite which channel I'm on I'm inclined to agree that it's a limitation of wireless g but if others have seen speeds of 20meg being often achievable then I'll happily go on testing different scenarios to try and improve it.

Thanks

Nick
 
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