Cable internet/Wireless Network/Dial-up Speed

[Andaru]

So I recently switched to wireless networking after my roommates got tired of the cat5 running along the floor to my room.

I got a trendnet TEW-423PI card after reading reviews saying they were among the best of the cheaper cards. We're running our network on the g wireless standard. My wireless network status claims I'm getting anywhere from 24 - 50 mbps, but speakeasy.net/speedtest of 114 kbps and the 30 second-10 minute page loads say otherwise.

We've got the Linksys SRX200 routher set up using WEP. The router is 20 feet away and goes through two walls. The roommate with the router in his room is getting the 70mbps and the roommate 1 floor down and a good 50 feet away gets 30 mbps going through at least 4 walls.

Virus check, Adware, and Spyware are clean.

So is it hardware issues? shitty card? firewall? the distance? bad karma from my undying hatred of wireless networking? the physical manifestation of God's wrath? Is there anything I'm missing?

Thanks for your help!

And to think I was getting 90mbps with the land line...

 

[jswjimmy]

well those are actually normal speeds for a network like that. i mean the only way you would see better results are with better antennas or with high power devices at both ends. i myself am running a directional 1.5 watt (after antenna) system at a rang of 3000ft through 1 wall, at a full 108mbps (in real world i would never see throughput near 108mbps, expect ~40 at best). now the only place you see a problem with these speeds are with file transfer from computer to computer, as i doubt your internet connection is above 20mbps (at best, with cable its more likely to be ~6mbps), a 24-50mbps connection should not be a problem. but with the increased latency you can have problems with online games. now your problems may be the card, interference(2.4ghz phone, microwave), or even thous walls.

 

[Andaru]

114 kilobits per second is what i'm getting, it might as well be dialup

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: AndaruI got a trendnet TEW-423PI card after reading reviews saying they were among the best of the cheaper cards. We're running our network on the g wireless standard. My wireless network status claims I'm getting anywhere from 24 - 50 mbps, but speakeasy.net/speedtest and the 30 second-10 minute page loads say otherwise.

We've got the Linksys SRX200 routher set up using WEP. The router is 20 feet away and goes through two walls. The roommate with the router in his room is getting the 70mbps and the roommate 1 floor down and a good 50 feet away gets 30 mbps going through at least 4 walls.

Well, these are pretty impressive figures for Internet. 30 Mb/s over 4 walls in 802.11g would also be high.

The max you can see with standard g under ideal circumstances (distance, interference, obstruction) is around 22 Mb/s actual throughput. Link speed, as you've seen, is something else. It could say 54 Mb/s or whatever, but you'll never see that in actual throughput.

Which adapter is being used in that case? Perhaps it's not standard g which happens to be performing particularly well. Perhaps you should find out about the adapter being used and get a similar one.

Perhaps that adapter is giving you and standard-g a problem? This could be tested by disabling the other clients during your test. From your comments, it's not just a minor performance tweaking issue for your NIC, but a major issue of some sort.

iperf 1.7 can be a decent tool for measuring LAN performance between two points ("client" and "server"). E.g.:

server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r

This factors out the "54 Mb/s" wireless exaggeration and lets you play with positioning / tuning / etc. to see what you can get. As a semi-random sample, I just measured around 18 Mb/s across 802.11g hereabout. That's actually not bad for wireless g.

Another factor to consider for wireless transfers is TCP receive window tuning. This is usually automatic in Vista, but needs registry tweaks in earlier Windows OSs. Only one setting needs to be changed. E.g.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]
"TcpWindowSize"=dword:0016d000

(I don't know what's the best value for this setting. I suggest trying a few values out, 64 K minimum.)

A reboot is needed for this to take effect. Setting this does correlate with improved download performance over wireless in some cases. Not having this set shouldn't be costing you minutes for web access though -- something else is going on.

Edit: I just noticed that you wrote 7000 Kb/s in the subject and 70 Mb/s in the text. 7000 Kb/s is 7 Mb/s, not 70 Mb/s. So perhaps the high numbers are just this mistake.

 

[jonmcc33]

What are ping times like in games?

 

[Andaru]

I just noticed that you wrote 7000 Kb/s in the subject and 70 Mb/s in the text. 7000 Kb/s is 7 Mb/s, not 70 Mb/s. So perhaps the high numbers are just this mistake.

You would be correct to make this assertion... I'm an idiot.
But i'm going to try your suggestions when I get off work today, until then thanks for your help.

And to respond to the game pings my beloved counter-strike is in the upper 200's

 

[JackMDS]

You using a G card with a pre-N device, you using WEP and you have two walls in between.

So it is Technology + Karma, and probably nothing todo with bad mouthing the poor TEW-423PI.

Put the computer on cable again and measure the same with the cable to get a frame of reference.

http://www.ezlan.net/Internet_Speed.html