slow wireless downloads

[waylman]

I've got a 10mb connection and I'm only getting about 5mb down. Wired is OK but I have to run a very long cable to do it. It's a Linksys WRT54G and I'm using a Linksys Wireless PCI card...any ideas why this is happening?

Thanks.

 

[jlazzaro]

11b or 11g? encryption? signal strength? wireless client being used? wrt54g firmware and pci card firmware / drivers up to date? what chanel are you operating on?

ultimate test: turn off all encryption, authentication. place the pc 3 feet away from the AP and give it a go. try channels 1, 6, or 11...

 

[vorgusa]

you get better then I get for Wireless. I get around 4.5Mb/sec on my 15 Mb/sec Internet connection. but I live in an apartment with lots of other AP's around. Most Wireless does not get too fast even thought they say 54Mb/sec I am not sure how fast they should get though, but check to see how many APs are around you by using the search for wireless networks

 

[marulee]

Use different channel and see if you can disable the firewall..

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: waylman
I've got a 10mb connection and I'm only getting about 5mb down. Wired is OK but I have to run a very long cable to do it. It's a Linksys WRT54G and I'm using a Linksys Wireless PCI card...any ideas why this is happening?

I think the technical answer is "because wireless sucks".

Joking aside, once you've dealt with channel / interference / path / distance / antennae placement and other such potential issues with wireless, you could try adjusting the receive window size parameters (or get Vista in order to have that automatically done for you).

There are two settings in particular for this -- Tcp1323Opts (set it to 1 for enabled), and TcpWindowSize (set it to some magic number >= 64K, e.g. 146000).

I do not suggest mucking around with additional options unless you're really interested in this stuff -- the above two have been enough in some cases for me to see an improvement over wireless.

http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=157

I've measured ~16 Mb/s wireless LAN/simulated WAN communication with a Linksys WRT54G v1 running DD-WRT using WPA, so it's capable of these speeds (at least for loads as in my synthetic tests).

Or you could run a long cable...

 

[marulee]

XP/2000 TWEAK

Yeah, neat! Cheers!