What's the fastest speed you've actually gotten out of your Wireless setup?

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Wireless seems totally crap to me, and utterly unable to achieve even a fraction of the rated connection speeds.

When I had a 54g D-Link Router, even with an excellent 5 bar connection, it couldn't even keep up with my 10mbp internet connection. As for copying files computer to computer, it was a joke, well under 11mbps.

Now I have a D-Link 655 Wireless N router, and a D-Link wireless N adapter in my PC. I have an excellent 5 bar connection at 300mbps. I even spent an hour using Netstumbler to perfect the connection as best as possible; using the best channels, and tweaking the antennas for the best signal strength. If I attach my laptop to the router via ethernet cable, the best speed I can copy across to it from my PC is 2.5 meg a second which is 20mbps. Pathetic! Right now I'm wirelessly copying something to my laptop which, despite an intel wireless N adapter, is connected at 54mbps (can't handle the channels I'm using for the N). It's going at a whopping 600kb a second (4.8mbps)!


Maybe it's just D-Link, but honestly, what's the fastest speeds you've actually gotten out of your Wireless setups?
 
The most I've been able to get from my 802.11g adapter is about 2.1MB/s receiving, and about 1.4MB/s sending. Yeah, even with 802.11n, it pales in comparison to 100Mb or 1Gb connections, not to mention the ping is crap, even with a good router, good adapter, and good system.

Wireless was really designed for just being able to be mobile in a location without the need of cumbersome ethernet cables. It's good for e-mail, web browsing, light gaming, and sending smaller files. Even 802.11n isn't that hot, and though it can send files at much faster speeds, the ping is still horrible.
 
My pings aren't too bad actually. I'm getting a consistent <1ms to my router as a I type so that's no prob.

It's just horrific that you can't get even a tenth of the rated speed with wireless. It's the biggest step back in technology ever. £80 for a router, £30 for an adapter and it's less secure and literally 100 times slower than a £10 ethernet cable.



Anyway, I'm very interested to see what's the best speed anyone's managed to get out of a Draft N router and what make it is etc...
 
Is there more than one computer/appliance connected wirelessly? Are you using anything like repeaters or range extenders? Is there anything that's wireless B that's connected to it?

Off the top of my head I'd say that your slow speeds might be caused by one of the following:

1) Wireless driver conflict, try letting windows alone manage your connection.
2) Using advanced encryption (WPA and especially WPA2 makes xfer slower in general because of more overhead)
3) Other PCs/laptops connected to the wireless access point

I get 2.6-2.8 MB/sec pretty regularly both up and down.

My settings:
WPA personal (WPA2 is too slow for me)
Frame Burst On
beacon interval 300ms
Bluetooth friendly mode off

If I turn off encryption I can get in the 3 MB/sec range
 
27mbps is about the highest you'll ever see on .11g. Wireless is a half duplex shared medium, so you cut the total bandwidth in half. Add in any interfering devices on the same channel and your throughput drops even more. Add a .11b client and see your throughput drop once again. The reason you see slightly less than 27mbps in the best scenarios is because your ACKs and other overhead are eating up the rest of the bandwidth.

.11n is another story. I've seen > 100mbps steady with a Cisco 1252 over 2.4ghz non channel bonded.
 
2MB/s (16mbit) copying a file from my server to my netbook. This is with G sitting in the same room.
 
My D-Link DIR-625 gets 6-10MB/s to my N laptop depending on how far I am in the house. And that's sustained speed moving 4GB worth of videos to my laptop.

How many walls are you going through? What's the distance your transferring these files at?
 
prochobo said:
27mbps is about the highest you'll ever see on .11g. Wireless is a half duplex shared medium, so you cut the total bandwidth in half. Add in any interfering devices on the same channel and your throughput drops even more. Add a .11b client and see your throughput drop once again. The reason you see slightly less than 27mbps in the best scenarios is because your ACKs and other overhead are eating up the rest of the bandwidth.
Click to expand...

+1

Good explanation :cool:.
 
staticlag said:
Is there more than one computer/appliance connected wirelessly? Are you using anything like repeaters or range extenders? Is there anything that's wireless B that's connected to it?

Off the top of my head I'd say that your slow speeds might be caused by one of the following:

1) Wireless driver conflict, try letting windows alone manage your connection.
2) Using advanced encryption (WPA and especially WPA2 makes xfer slower in general because of more overhead)
3) Other PCs/laptops connected to the wireless access point

I get 2.6-2.8 MB/sec pretty regularly both up and down.

My settings:
WPA personal (WPA2 is too slow for me)
Frame Burst On
beacon interval 300ms
Bluetooth friendly mode off

If I turn off encryption I can get in the 3 MB/sec range
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply.

I already have windows managing the wireless. In setup of setup everything seems fine. The connection doesn't feel slow, and pings are very good, I'm just annoyed that a 300 excellent connection can barely deliver 10% of that speed. I have WPA2 on, I might try disabling it and seeing if that improves things. I had assumed that the encryption would be done in hardware in a modern router and not introduce any overhead. I'll go check that...

And so wireless is half duplex so a 300mbps can only ever deliver a theoretical max of 150mbps (~18meg a sec). Didn't know that.

Shane_c82 said:
My D-Link DIR-625 gets 6-10MB/s to my N laptop depending on how far I am in the house. And that's sustained speed moving 4GB worth of videos to my laptop.

How many walls are you going through? What's the distance your transferring these files at?
Click to expand...

Upstairs to downstairs. But the signal strength is excellent and as I've said, I've used netstumbler to optimise the signal/noise ratio to as minimal as I can. I'm hoping turning off wpa2 might make a difference, will report back...
 
Ok, disabling WPA2 made no improvement, however...


Enabling WLAN partition gave me a massive boost to 6 meg a second from my PC wirelessly to router and then via ethernet cable to laptop. Enabling WMM and Extra wireless protection boosted the wireless speed of my laptop letting it connect at 150mbps.


Seems funny that with my old 54G router I could, at best, get 11mbps, and with my Wireless N I get just over 54mbps. It's like you get the actual performance of the generation below. Wireless - 'lol'.
 
Teh fastest sustained transfers I got over wireless N to my nearest PC (about 10 feet away and through through 1 brick wall (actually a brick fireplace) was about 14 MBps.

The best transfer to my other media PC, about 30 feet awayand through 3 interior walls is about 5 MBps.

That was after forcing the use of 40 MHz channel width and WMM on my D-Link DIR 655
 
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