[kinda OT] home network speed

[Brandon Sandrowicz]

On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Thomas Milne
<tbrucemilne-TcoXwbchSccMMYnvST3LeUB+6BGkLq7r at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Not sure even what question to ask, but basically I've got my desktop
> machine with an onboard gigabit ethernet, a Linksys WRT54GL, and a
> multimedia drive connected to my TV which has wireless networking
> built in:
>
> http://www.mediagateusa.com/mg800hd.html
>
> For wireless, it supports:
>
> (Wi-Fi) IEEE 802.11 b/g/n; Wireless Security: WEP, WPA-P5K, WPA2-PSK,
> Wireless infrastructure and Ad-Hoc Mode
>
> I've been seeing transfer speeds around 1.2 MB/s, which is about
> 1/10th what I was hoping/expecting. Was I expecting too much? This is
> the first time this has ever been an issue, so I'm not sure how to
> investigate this.

Is the drive connecting with 802.11b?  Try changing your network over
to be 802.11g-only in the router/ap settings.  Apparently when you are
in mixed mode -- b and g -- if a 802.11b device connects to the
network the entire network speed drops. I'm not sure if this is
AccessPoint-dependent or just a product of the 802.11 wireless
protocol, but I've heard of it.

Another thing to consider is wireless interference. For example,
802.11g's max speed of 54Mbit/s, but that is the theoretical max.  If
there is a lot of interference from other wireless networks, devices,
microwaves in operation, etc, this can effect the speed causing it to
drop.  Sometimes this is also wireless chip and/or driver dependent.
For example, the ath5k kernel driver doesn't deal with noise as well
as the ath_pci (MadWifi) driver. I've been too lazy to change it back,
but when I connect to the network after getting home from work it
connects/disconnects at least 2 or 3 times before it decides to keep a
stable connection (which is interesting seeing as my laptop is at most
6 feet from the access point with nothing but air in between).  I've
also seen claims on mailing lists that the ath5k doesn't run at 'full
speed' compared to the ath_pci driver with the same hardware on the
same network.

The only thing that you could try to do to deal with interference (at
least interference from other networks) is to try different channels
for your access point, but even then you may have issues.  Those
'SuperG' routers that used to be popular basically increased their
bandwidth by using *all channels at once*... creating a helluva lot of
interference for other networks that were too close.

-- 
Brandon Sandrowicz
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