Poor wireless broadband service...

[onlyCOpunk]

My brother came home from law school and brought with him his wireless network. We have cable internet and I set up the router/hub which is 802.11b directly to the cable modem. Then I bought a USB wireless network card 802.11b and hooked up my computer in the next room. I forgot to mention that all network products are linksys. Now when I the internet on my computer it's extremely sketchy. It's much much slower for one thing, and when I use filesharing programs like Kazaa I get sub par 56k performance. The main computer directly connected to the router runs just as fast as it did before. I'm wondering if there's anything I can do to speed things up on the wireless end. Is it because the network card is USB, I wouldn't imagine that slowing it down too much.

 

[hjo3]

No, USB, even 1.0, has a bandwidth of at least 12 mbps (802.11b only uses 11 mbps).

What is the signal strength you're getting on your system? I don't know about other OSs, but in Win XP, hitting properties on your network connection will give you a signal strength rated from 1 to 5.

It could be that you have some sort of appliance or something causing interference for your wireless network... or maybe your walls are lead-lined or something weird. You could try moving the system around (or ideally, hooking the net adapter up to a laptop) and see if the speed improves.

Oh, try testing your your bandwidth on your machine here:
http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/

Maybe the filesharing services are just having a bad day or something. This test could show if it's really the wireless stuff that's the problem.