Extremely slow wireless transfer speeds

[j03h4gLund]

So I was trying to stream a video from my pc to my laptop wirelessly and had extremely bad buffering. I'm not talking once every 10 or 15 minutes no.. I'm talking the video would play 1 second then buffer for around a minute then play another second or two... rinse repeat. So I was like F that and decided I'll just transfer the file over to the laptop. I was getting like 5-15kbps. There is obviously a problem here. I thought maybe it was the MKV file that was causing the problem as I've read on a few forums that MKV files needed special codecs to stream properly and have had similar issues streaming to my xbox 360, so I tried an AVI... same thing. Finally I hooked the laptop directly to the access point via cat5 cable... bingo! 12mbs - that's more like it. Any idea why my wireless is being this slow? Here is my setup:

ISP : Charter Cable 20Mbs x 4Mbs
Main Router : Belkin Surf 300N
Access Point : Netgear Range Extender WN2000RPT
My PC is hooked directly to the access point via cat5 cable
Laptop using Linksys AE1000 wireless N usb adapter
Laptop internet speedtest : 12Mbs x 4Mbs
PC internet speedtest : Download Speed: 20939 kbps (2617.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 4257 kbps (532.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

What gives?

:: EDIT ::
So, I tried transfering another two files from my PC to my laptop, keeping both computers hooked directly to the access point via ethernet. The speeds went back to 5-15Kbps!!! Now I'm just outright perplexed. (Mind you, I work at an ISP and help people with their home networks all day.) So I tried changing the VLAN priority to off, and changed duplex on both adapters to half after watching this video which looked to be exactly the same problem I was having... needless to say that didn't work. So now I think well it has to be my access point or the 30 ft ethernet cable that's hooked to my desktop. So I take the wireless N USB adapter and plug it into my desktop while having laptop direclty to access point and viola it worked... well sorta. It worked about 30% of the way then the file transfer is interuppted saying it cannot communicate to the shared folder and also am unable to access the internet on either machine, mind you I have been having some extremely irritating disconnects that last maybe 30 seconds to a minute.

So with all that being said - I'm convinced the problem lies within my Netgear access point.

3 hours later...
/wrists
/thread

Thanks for reading and please if you have any suggestions as to what might be causing my dc's, feel free to reply. Friggin wireless...

 

[jswjimmy]

While this is a 802.11N device, it has a CPU in it that is about as fast as a WRT-54G and ram to match. The Surf in its name implies that it is made for very basic Surfing the web not heavy traffic. I am not familiar with the WN2000RPT, but it could also have this problem as a lot of budget hardware is very slow. You really have to do you're homework before buying something like this. The low end is made to be cheap, not offer throughput. though there are still some good devices at a low price point, you cant just buy something at Walmart without looking it up and expect it to take anything you throw at it.

 

[spidey07]

Are you using homemade patch cables, or are they factory made patch cables? It sounds like a physical layer/cabling issue. Wireless can be excruciatingly slow in noisy environments (less than 1 Mbs)

 

[dawks]

I offer no fix, but I will mention I've seen strange things myself. I have a Mac Pro and a Corei5 2450 Win7 machine, both connected via gigabit. Yesterday I moved an 8gig MKV from the Win7 machine to the Mac on the Mac.. it transferred at about 65MEGS/sec. Then I tried to move a different 8gig MKV from the Mac to the Win7 machine.. it was only copying at ~800kb/sec. So I went to the Win7 Machine and initiated the same copy, and Windows 7 copied it at ~70MEGS/sec.

Not sure why strange things like this happen. Wish I knew.