Lan Is 3 X Faster Than Wireless Connection

[ChiangMaiThai]

I am 2 feet from my wireless router. When I connect by LAN, I get speeds of almost 3Mbps on US servers via speedtest.net. When I connect to the same router via wireless, I never get more than 1Mbps. I have full signal strength. What can cause this huge discrepancy?

There is another router that belongs to another netwrk about 3 meters from me. Would that have a negative affect?

[phoneguy702]

Has very little to do with distance, the wireless will always be slower than a wired connection due to the difference in speed of the medium 100Mbps wired to 56Mbps wireless. The reason for using wireless is mobility and not having to run cables, the trade off is speed.

[ChiangMaiThai]

Has very little to do with distance, the wireless will always be slower than a wired connection due to the difference in speed of the medium 100Mbps wired to 56Mbps wireless. The reason for using wireless is mobility and not having to run cables, the trade off is speed.

Wow, I never realized that speed is sacrifices when using wireless.

Here's the test results:

LAN

WIRELESS

Wireless never makes it above 1Mbps

[monty]

Very strange.

Your wireless should outperform your internet by a fairly big margin.

Normally if you are connected at 54 Mbps, you should easily get a 15 Mbps actual throughput. I'm getting normally over 20 Mbps, so in o way it is slowing down my 3 Mbps ADSL connection!

You could try another channel on your wifi router, you might indeed get interference from other wifi points, or from any other 2.4 Ghz equipment (wireless phones, leaky microwave etc)

[namoo]

Reduce your MTU to something like 1458 or 1492 or even start at 1400 at work your way up. Reduces packet size might work due to the wireless overheads in each packet. Or upgrade to N.

Edited May 31, 2009 by namoo

[NHJ]

it also depends how your routeur and wireless card handle the encryption system, you can try without security and see if there's a difference.

btw is your wireless card or routeur G ?

[Prasert]

WiFi equipment can be set to use channels 1 to 13 (1 to 14 if you're in Japan).

A WiFi network needs the bandwidth of 4 channels together. So that means you can have 4 non-overlapping WiFi networks if you set the channels on 1 , 5 , 9 and 13 on nearby equipment.

If channels from different accesspoints overlap, interference will degrade performance. The stronger those other signals, the more degredation caused.

Wireless-N uses 12 channels at the same time instead of 4.

So if you scan for wireless networks and a list of over 10 networks shows up, you can bet there will be interference, especially when people set their radios to transmit with more power than really necessary. That is one of the reasons why the transmission limit is 20 dB EIRP.

Another big difference with wired networks is that a switch can be set to full-duplex (sending and receiving data at the same time over 2 pairs of copper cable), while WiFi is always half-duplex (either sending or receiving data). A 54Mbps WiFi link will have a maximum throughput of 25Mbps to one single station while no other stations are associated. The more associated stations, the lower the throughput as the accesspoint can only send to one single station at the same time.

The type of traffic also makes a big difference. WiFi is basically designed to only handle unicast traffic in repeated bursts. Which means that it will work just fine for eg. webbrowsing and other non-time sensitive traffic.

Multicasts perform really bad, as the access-point has to change a single multicast stream into individual unicast streams (although this is still ot widely used).

Video streaming over WiFi quickly suffers when other stations are using the same WiFi network, e.g. another station watching a video stream or downloading a torrent with a good download speed.

[Crushdepth]

When I connect to the same router via wireless, I never get more than 1Mbps.

If you are using wireless 'b' equipment (either router or client) then this is about the maximum you can expect.

[surface]

Even 802.11b runs at 11Mb

[stumonster]

Another big difference with wired networks is that a switch can be set to full-duplex (sending and receiving data at the same time over 2 pairs of copper cable), while WiFi is always half-duplex (either sending or receiving data). A 54Mbps WiFi link will have a maximum throughput of 25Mbps to one single station while no other stations are associated. The more associated stations, the lower the throughput as the accesspoint can only send to one single station at the same time.

this is an important point that many people do not take into account when using wifi . also you must take into account the subtle latency addition and wireless collision avoidance. this adds a lot more overhead than in a conventional LAN connection.

that said I would expect your wif ( if it is g at both ends ) to be a bit faster than 1 Mbit/s

[Prasert]

About the OP:

1 accesspoint at 2 feet and another accesspoint at 3 meters. (I guess he means 60cm)

Same channel or interfering channels?

How many other access-points are nearby?

[Prasert]

Even 802.11b runs at 11Mb

True.

But after the protocol overhead, association and acknowleding, the maximum data throughput will not exceed 5Mps.

[monty]

Peak data rates on 802.11b are between 4 and 5 Mbps.

That is in close to perfect circumstances (short distance, no interference etc...).

Practically one would still see between 2 and 3 Mbps most of the times.

On 802.11g, one should see at least 4 times this, i.e. between 8 and 12 Mbps in real, less then perfect circumstances, up to and over 20 Mbps in excellent conditions.

The OP's wifi connection seems to be slower then the 802.11b standard in poor conditions!

[raro]

@ Prasert: Very interesting input! I had this problem at the office the other day when setting up a new router. At first we had permanent disconnections with the WiFi, only after playing around with the channels we got the connections stabilized.

At home I have a 11 Mb WiFi and I manage to download (on a good day I must say...) at 200+ kBps out of a 2 Mb line...this is more or less maxing out the nominal speed.

[h90]

Very strange.

Your wireless should outperform your internet by a fairly big margin.

Normally if you are connected at 54 Mbps, you should easily get a 15 Mbps actual throughput. I'm getting normally over 20 Mbps, so in o way it is slowing down my 3 Mbps ADSL connection!

You could try another channel on your wifi router, you might indeed get interference from other wifi points, or from any other 2.4 Ghz equipment (wireless phones, leaky microwave etc)

I have the same problem as OP on my Aspire 5520G. Both encrypted and not encrypted on my current Wireless modem at home.

While it was a lot faster on my old laptop with TP-Link 54 Mbps card.

I didn't tried the aspire with a different WLan source, but it seems it shows a HIGHER signal strength than the old with the card.

It seems the new one can't handle more than 25 % of the max. shown in Windoze task manager and if there are a lot things at the same time (windoze update, online radio and webpages) it seems to go down to zero.

I think it is more of a driver issue but don't know yet.

[raro]

I think it is more of a driver issue but don't know yet.

That was my first thought when reading your post!

If you are using XP, Acer didn't bother much about providing proper drivers for their WLAN adapters. Had the same problem with mine which forced me into Vista and eventually into win7. The internet speed in win7 is way better than under Vista!

[Prasert]

The signal strength displayed in Windows is something you can't rely on.

I have heard so many customers complaining they only had two out of five bars signal strength while their connection was still running on 54Mbps.

And at the same time, the accesspoint showed more than 10 dB signal-noise-ratio, which is adequate enough for a stable WiFi link.

The bar indicators in windows (XP/Vista) do not give a good indication of signal quality. Only an accesspoint showing SNR and signal strength in decibel will give you that information.

[h90]

I think it is more of a driver issue but don't know yet.

That was my first thought when reading your post!

If you are using XP, Acer didn't bother much about providing proper drivers for their WLAN adapters. Had the same problem with mine which forced me into Vista and eventually into win7. The internet speed in win7 is way better than under Vista!

Yes a couple of useful software doesn't even exist for winxp, just for Vista (even there is no reason as can be started and work with tricks). As well nothing for Linux....seems they are very close to Microsoft.