Wireless network speed help please

[PoiZoNouZ]

I have the following config:

PC with a Netgear 108mbps pci card
Laptop with a 108mbps onboard wifi
Netgear DG834GT router
Sumvision Cyclone (similar to Mede8er) with a 300mbps wifi dongle

No matter which device do I copy from/to, be it laptop to pc, pc to Cyclone etc, my speeds are a joke. 500-900k/s, things taking an age to copy. What can I do to speed things up? I run Bitdefender on all my machines, don't think that limits speeds? Disabled firewall, made no difference.

It is really annoying!

 

[NoRulez]

It's called DDR scaling (Dynamic data rate). Most wireless equipment use it as a standard feature that cannot be disabled via admin scripts, etc.
One can normally expect 50% of the rated speed if the signal strength is 100%, but that sometimes drops to less than 10% with poor signals due to construction of the house or office and distance from the access point.
OS can be a major factor in wireless speed, also the size and quantity of files being copied.
Also consider: The wireless speed of the equipment is advertised in megaBITS per second and the speed shown when copying is megaBYTES. Your 900k/s roughly translates to 1 megaBIT...
Your AV may have a major influence if "on access" detection is set. Each file then gets scanned as it is copied and again scanned on the 2nd machine where it is saved.

 

[InTheCube]

Even so.. 500 - 900 kB/s is a terrible speed, especially for a home WLAN. Something is definitely wrong. Copying lots and lots of small files (<100kb, 1000+ files) over a WLAN (or even a wired network for that matter) is much slower (about 2-3 times slower) than copying a single large file. Is this possible the problem? I've found that if you compress all these files into a single zip/rar file, then send it over the network, it is much faster, even taking the zipping operatoin into account. It's all the overhead of disk access on both sides, network I/O overhead per file, checksums, hashes, and other things that slow it down...

I get at least 4mB/s on my home WLAN for large files, but it's a 802.11n (300mbps) network, and my laptop supports 802.11n as well. I've also gotten 2 - 3mB/s on a 54mbps WLAN. So something is definitely up..

How good is the signal from PC 1 to your router/access point, and from your router access point to PC2? You need to ensure that both of them have have good to excellent signal to get close to the theoretical maximum speeds...

 

[PoiZoNouZ]

Well, switched off the auto 108 in the router, set it to b+g only, now I get 1.3mb/s, seems better.

I hate wifi.

Signal to pc is about 60%, to Cyclone about 80%.

 

[InTheCube]

Well, switched off the auto 108 in the router, set it to b+g only, now I get 1.3mb/s, seems better.

Maybe you're having driver issues on one of the machines? The maximum transfer rate between the two machines will be the slower transfer rate between each machine and the router/WAP, i.e. the weakest link in the chain.. So any problems you're having on either side, or anywhere in your "chain" will affect the transfer rate between the 2 machines....

Signal to pc is about 60%, to Cyclone about 80%.

Again, you are limited by the 60% signal. I believe that 108mbps (is this also 802.11n?) relies on better signalling to push through more data, and if your signal isn't so good, it's gonna struggle. Also, it doesn't matter if the other machine has 80% or even 100% signal, as the bottleneck will be on the 60% side. You just can't squeeze more data into 60% signal. Think of a 6 lane highway in rush hour, and then a 10 lane highway, and which of the two will be able to push more cars through per hour/minute...

I hate wifi.

Yip wireless technologies suck in general - wired is ALWAYS faster. Can't you run ethernet cabling between your machines in the router? It's pretty easy to do on your own if you have some decent wiring/cabling skills, and not that expensive....

You simply can't beat the speed of light (except of course through a black hole, but that's for another discussion)

 

[SilverNodashi]

Odd, I get 1.6MB on my 54MB wifi setup, from a Windows 7 PC with a 108Mbps PCI Nic to a Linux SAMBA server, over a Linksys 54G AP. As matter of interest, what OS's are you running? One of our clients has a Windows Vista PC - which is about 5-8m away from their 108Mbps AP on the top floor. 2 other PC's running Windows XP is on the bottom floor, about 50m away, so it connects to the same AP through the concrete floor.

Funnily enough, the Widows Vista PC is just always slower on the wifi than the XP PC's, and I never could figure it out, even with an extended 2bdi antenna (like this one: http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/260054260/2DBI_antenna_with_suction_cup.html) on the desk it is slower. So, my guess is the wifi drivers for Vista doesn't work as well?

Change your AP's channel to 12 (if it can, otherwise use the 2nd highest in the list), or 2. AP's normally use 6 by default, so other devices (cordless phone, cellphones, laptops, neighbor, alarm system, microwave?) that uses channel 6 could interfere with it.

 

[Nameite]

+1 to interference.
Set the channel to either 1 or 11. Those are the values that don't overlap with channel 6...allowing maximum transfer.

 

[PoiZoNouZ]

Cool, I will change the channel as well.

Running Win 7 64 bit on pc, and Vista on laptop.

 

[Nameite]

Another thing though, if you get a wifi sniffer to see what channel the strongest AP besides your own one, then just set the channel differently.

If there is auito channel selection in the router configuration, just click it. It will choose the channel with the least occupancy.