[Closed] Wireless N - a con?

What computer? What router? Are they "value"??

Loads of things get in the way of achieving anything even approaching the theoretical max speed on any wireless device.

A few examples being distance from router, building construction, drivers, interference from other peoples broadband, overheads from the wireless protocal, is it "N" or "N light"....there are many more, but you get the idea.

You can only minimise the effects & you'll never get the the same throughput as more traditional wired method.

You can download some freebie software called inSSIDer 2 ( from places like Metageek) & this will let you know what channels other peoples wi-fi devices are using so that you can move yours away to another less populated channel.

If you 'can' go wired, it proberbly better to do so.

Good luck though !

Chris

Well noise and signal weakness should affect the speed it's negotiated at, surely? So if it says I'm connected at 144Mb/s I should have a good clean signal.

If you 'can' go wired, it proberbly better to do so.

Believe me if I could avoid pissing about with wireless I definitely would. I'd be £40 richer too.

He's in Germany. Each packet is 5 times longer than in the Uk because the german word for 'protocol' is 179 characters long.

Password length can also affect throughput.

Class, Samuri, Class!

You need channel bonding for both router and network adaptors to get maximum speed.
http://compnetworking.about.com/od/wireless/f/80211n-300-mbps.htm

the password legnth thing got me thinking (...once I'd stopped chuckling at Samuri's comment).

The stronger encryption methods do indeed slow throughput ( eg wpa2-psk)
If you're feeling brave, you could as an experiment try turning off the encryption for a VERY short spell - usual caveats apply.
( Not sure I'd feel too happy doing it myself, but I do like my security)

Chris

Knew I shoulda got powerline...

samuri, I have absolutely no clue about all the techie guff but that is the funniest thing I've seen on STW since chasealex's picture got posted all those years ago.

You need channel bonding for both router and network adaptors to get maximum speed.

This. Basically you need "n" at both ends for an 802.11n connection. If the media whosit is 802.11b it doesn't matter what's at the other end, it'll run like a pup.

Also, I've seen 802.11b/g/n routers where they'll auto-switch between the different variants... but only ever use one at once. So introduce your old Nintendo DS into your nice shiny 802.11n WLAN and suddenly [i]everything [/i]is running at 802.11b.

I don't have a huge amount of dealing with WiFi day to day (other than my own LAN) so I couldn't say for sure how common this problem is; it might never happen any more for all I know. It might be worth switching off everything else temporarily as a troubleshooting step though.

This. Basically you need "n" at both ends for an 802.11n connection. If the media whosit is 802.11b it doesn't matter what's at the other end, it'll run like a pup

Er yes mate that is fairly obvious, I'm not a complete numpty 🙂 the media whatsit is indeed N as is everything else on this subnet now.

And it reports I am connected at 144Mbps so I must be on N, right?

Anyway - Media Centre Exteders are crap. NOTHING will stream on it apart from iPlayer and even then not the live stuff through TunerFreeMCE. No Hulu, no Sky player, nothing. This is rubbish.

I don't know about actual figures but switching to N from G was a really big improvement for me.

64 Mb/s seems pretty fast really to us old skool folk...

I assume you've updated to the latest firmware/drivers on all the systems you're using?

Also check which encryption protocol you're using. uise AES/CCMP over TKIP otherwise you're connection will revert to g levels of bandwidth.

You're connection speed (in Megabits - Mb per second not Megabytes - MB) is just the speed it conducted it's initial connection with and doesn't tell you what you're current speeds are.

Also try "tracert xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" for your other computer and check that it is getting hung up at the router.

Er yes mate that is fairly obvious, I'm not a complete numpty

Sorry dude, no offence meant - I didn't spot who was asking. (-:

And it reports I am connected at 144Mbps so I must be on N, right?

Either that or it's lying. Anything over 54Mbps has to be 802.11n, yes, assuming it's not doing something proprietary and freaky.

Bear in mind that the speed you're seeing reported by the NIC will be mega[i]bits[/i] per second whereas the file transfer from your PC will be kilo[i]bytes[/i] per second. Granted there's still something of a a performance degradation there though...!

you sure you're not betting Bytes and Bits mixed up?

Files sizes are normally in Bytes ie 1.5 M Bytes, but LAN speeds are quoted in Bits is 174 Mbit/s = 21.75 MB/s

so what are you using as the extender?

I am not getting bits and bytes mixed up. The movie should be what, 300kilobytes/second, my file transfer was 800kilobytes/second, so there's a lot of my theoretical 16megabyes/s gone missing. I mean I know it's only theoretical but I'd expect more than 15% of the reported bandwidth being usable.

There's a bottleneck somewhere, and I wonder if it's the CPU on the router..? Or, it COULD be the other two network clients being in G mode. I didn't specifically check them although they are supposed to be multi-mode and hence select the highest available.

The Media Centre Extender is a Linksys DMA2100 which is slow and clunky - I could overlook this but the fact that it hardly supports any codecs is bloody annoying 🙁 Just going to have to try and download as much as I can, which to be honest is a lot less convenient.

Also check which encryption protocol you're using. uise AES/CCMP over TKIP otherwise you're connection will revert to g levels of bandwidth.

Right, will see about checking this (if I can - didn't see a setting for it but will look again). Thanks 🙂

I've found though that if the wifi link speed varies, Windows does report it when you open up task manager.