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Guys with wireless networks. How did you organize your setup?

Are there a lot of other wireless users around you? I live off campus in an apartment complex filled most with college students. There's wireless everywhere and the interference can get pretty bad. Channel 6 was unusable for me so I switched to 11 and now it works alright.
 
Roter: D-Link DI-524 (802.11g)
Network cards: Xterasys XN-2522g (802.11g)

Router is in my room mounted on the wall (!!) close to the door. My friends computer is in the next room 15 feet away. It is not in the direct 'line-of-sight' but pretty close actually.
The power level says 'Normal' on his rig (I'd say 50% from the scale). His computer is put up agains a wall so the antenna is hidden by his case and monitor.
His computer is old. He's using a Celeron 350 + Win98.

I expected to get more speed out of this setup since they are pretty close to each other. The manual says it has a range of 300 feet indoors.

There are other networks in the neighbourhood so I set mine to Ch 8, which is not used by anyone else.
I use 128 bit WEP too.

What more info do you need?
 
in my general experience, wireless networking is a crap shoot unless your computers have respectable antenna's, currently my WAP and cards are sitting on a shelf collecting dust. nothing but disappointment and heatbreak.
 
yes there are aftermarket antennas for both routers and cards. depends if the router/card has removable antenna though. and if your having trouble at 15 feet, thats a sign of something that isn't gonna be helped much by a bigger antenna. its not more power, its more like more focused with the longer range antennas.
 
Originally posted by: igowerf
I don't know about wireless G, but in 11b, WEP will slow down your transfers.
Click to expand...

Yes it does slow it down. I haven't tried without.
Don't I need WEP tp prevent others to use my network? Or should I use MAC filtering instead?
 
Originally posted by: FrustratedUser
Originally posted by: igowerf
I don't know about wireless G, but in 11b, WEP will slow down your transfers.
Click to expand...

Yes it does slow it down. I haven't tried without.
Don't I need WEP tp prevent others to use my network? Or should I use MAC filtering instead?
Click to expand...


I'd say use both WEP (or better yet WPA if that can be done with your equipment) and MAC filtering. But MAC filtering alone is no substitute for WEP, as sad as WEP is.

Regarding tart666's statement about WEP slowing transfers by 2% in most benchmarks -- I don't know about your particular equipment, but some of this consumer-level 802.11b hardware has been reported to take a 10-20% throughput hit with 128 bit WEP enabled. But most of the 802.11g stuff I've seen suffers only 5% drop in throughput with WPA (a better encryption scheme) enabled. WEP / WPA is still worth it unless you are well separated from all neighbors and public roads.

If you do a lot of file transfers you want wire. Espcially since with only 15 feet of separation you are only seeing a half-strength signal. Looks as though building materials and other stuff between the router and your friend's computer are causing the problem. You might be able to improve this by changing the orientation of the router and the orientation of the client antenna. If wireless is a necessity I think that USB-connected clients work a lot better for desktop systems since they give you so much more flexibility in orienting the antenna and getting it away from the main computer case.

Ernie
 
Are you using mixed mode g/b or just g? Mixed mode, IIRC, can slow down transfer.
I doubt you will get more than 1~2MB/s throughput though, have a computer maybe 15feet away through a couple of doors/walls and it gets 2MB/s sometimes, and a laptop that gets similar (through the ceiling).
800 does seem low though.
 
With my DI-614+ which a 802.11B router with 128 bit WEP enabled I get about 5 Mbit/sec with my Laptop with a Centrino setup. This is about anywhere in the apartment which is actually pretty small. I never go below "good" for the signal. I am also on channel 6 as there is only one other wireless network around me and they are on 11.
 
WEP is not worthless. It is obviously nowhere near as good as WPA, but it is not worthless. Saying that WEP is worthless might lead someone to figure that they might as well not use encryption at all if they did not have the ability to use WPA. That would be dumb.

Ernie
 
yup, wep isn't worthless. its not anywhere near perfect, but if used correctly, its not exactly breakable by a normal person in a reasonable amount of time. mac filtering is worthless though. it is sent unencrypted and can be spoofed withs software. used in combination with each other they make a decently formidable combination that only a dedicated attacker with lots of time can get through. to break wep they need to basically capture hundreds of megs of packets to examine. could take weeks. just make sure your wep passcode generator is made up of a decently complicated string of words/numbers so they cannot use brute force dictionary method. do not broadcast ssid either. rotate wep key once a month. password protect shared drives. and someone will have to be really really interested in your network before they can gain access. wep only eats a small % of bandwidth. 64bit wep is about all you need. 64bit is really 40bit anyways. the 24 bit section used for random number generation is the weakpoint of wep anyways, and used to crack it. same 24 bits used by 128bit wep.
 
Something is wrong with your setup. Have you tried moving the router (or just the antennas) or the PC's? I have no experience with your exactl hardware, but I live in a 3 story house, with PC's all over. The router is on the thrid floor connected to a cable modem, and the farthes PC in the basement still has >50% signal integrity and transfers well over 6Mb/sec. File transfers on the top floor achieve more than 9Mb/sec using my Linksys 802.11b router and mini-PCI nic.
 
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