Why is my wireless network so slow?

[NTB]

In my house, I've set up a wireless-b network to share an internet connection amongst a couple of computers. It works wonderfully, except that it's quite a bit slower than it should be - both from a computer to the internet (and back), and just between computers on the network. Two of the systems are desktops, and the best speed I can get between them is right around 1 to 1.5 Mbps. If I try to download something from the internet, sometimes I can hit that speed; most of the time it's closer to half of that. Both of these computers are equipped with USB wireless cards.

The last computer is my laptop, which uses a PC-card type wireless card. On that, I can get almost the full 3Mbit/sec download speed from my internet connection. Transfering between computers I'm not so sure about, because I haven't done it in a while, but I suspect that it would be similar in speed to the transfer between the two desktops, unless I could get another PC-card or PCI-equipped machine in here.

Originally I thought that the USB 1.1 connections that the desktop "cards" use was the problem, but that shouldn't be it; USB 1.1 is rated at 11Mbps, correct? It shouldn't be overhead from using the encryption built into the router - that should slow things down a little, but if it were the problem, my laptop would be running at 1.5 Mbps too, I would think. I'm out of ideas. Anybody else have a suggestion? Here is a list of the equipment I'm using, if that would help at all:

EDIT: I should add - WinXP's little network monitor says connection strength is excellent, and is set to the full 11Mbps.

Router: Netgear MR814 v.2
USB cards: Netgear MA-111
PC-card: Linksys Instant Wireless WPC11 v.3

Nate

 

[azel]

USB 1.1 has two speed modes:

- Full Speed Mode (12 Mbps)
- Low Speed Mode (1.5 Mbps)

So judging from your max speed it seems like somewhere USB connection is using low speed mode.
The USB wireless device and your USB controller most likely supports full speed mode so it may be driver conflict or settings on either the USB wireless device or your laptop's USB controller.

Are you able to transfer files from USB memory devices at a higher rate?

 

[NTB]

My current computer is equipped with USB 2.0 ports, and everything else seems to work at faster speeds - 2 USB 1.1 printers & a USB 2.0 scanner.

The USB wireless "cards" are on two seperate desktops, and both do the same thing - top out at 1.5Mbps. My laptop (with the PC-card based connection) is the only thing I've got that can hit anything faster.

EDIT: My 256MB USB memory key seems to work at normal speed (higher than 1.5Mbps, anyway) as well.

Nate

 

[NTB]

And another update: As of that first post, I was using Windows XP to configure and control my wireless connection, rather than the little utility that Netgear provides along with their drivers. For curiosity's sake, I uninstalled the old drivers, then re-installed them, along with the utility, and disabled Window's ability to control the wireless connection. Withe the netgear software, the best connection it would pick up automatically was 2.0Mbps; I had to force it to go to 11. I shouldn't have to - the router is sitting only about 10 or twelve feet behind me in the same room. Either way, nothing worked - whenever I tried to open IE, no pages would come up. I also couldn't ping anything from the command line. So now I'm back to letting windows control the connection, so that at least I can *use* it, but it's still running slow.

EDIT: have tried the latest drivers (new ones were released after I installed this some time ago), to no avail. Still getting roughly 1.5Mbps.

Nate

 

[NTB]

One last update:

Apparently it's the adapter. I was at walmart today, and as an experiment I picked up a Linksys wireless-G USB network adapter; they said I could return it if I wanted to so I thought I'd give it a shot. Brought it home, plugged it in, and once it was set up correctly, I tested it a couple different ways:

1. my speedtest results at dslreports.com nearly doubled (~1400kbps versus 700-800kbps with the netgear adapters)

2. downloaded a 1080i video from the bunch of clips that someone linked to here a long time ago - it was stuff from microsoft. that hit 360KB/s, which at 2880kbps (8kbit = 1kByte, right?), is nearly the limit of my cable connection. Same goes for the conan o'brien video that somebody uploaded in a thread over in OT.

I'd still like to know what the netgear adapters work so slowly though, that aggravates me 🙁

Nate