Wireless Router Speed Problem
Thursday, September 27th, 2007 - 2:56am
I set up a wireless router for my parents a while back, and everything is working well except the 3 laptops that are connected to it are getting different speeds. My brother's is getting 5Mb or more, my mom's work laptop is getting about 3.8Mb, and my mom's personal laptop is only getting 2.9Mb according to several different speed tests.
The 5Mb and 2.9 Mb laptops both have excellent signal strength to the router, and the 3.8Mb one is getting good signal. Their cable connection is rated at 5Mb. None of them are heavy internet users, no p2p programs, etc. It's a LinkSys router, purchased from Best Buy about a year ago.
Can anyone shed light on why speeds would vary so widely between them all?
"People in general have no principles, they do not believe in property rights (except as those rights apply to them), and they will steal all they want as long as they stand no risk of getting arrested for it. -GreatAjax on Piracy
I'll assume that you have no Wireless-B (older) devices on the network.
1) Disable power management on Laptop's network cards, by setting the power consumption to MAX.
2) Disable "CTS/RTS Protection", also known as "B/G Protection" in the router's wireless settings and in the settings of each individual wireless card.
3) Enable "Frame Burst" and "Frame Aggregation" wherever you see it (router AND wireless cards). If you see "Afterburner" option in the router, disable it. While the former options are generally good and have no side-effects, Afterburner can be a hit and miss.
4) Change the wireless channel to 11. For unexplainable reason, 1 gives me the worst throughput, 6 is better, 11 is best.
I usually get crucified for this, but so far I have had no problems.
Turn of encrpytion / wep security and use the mac filter instead.
Yea I know someone could sppof a mac address if you live in a geek neighborhood, but there are usually five people with a completley open wireless network that are easier targets.
Always vigilient, and dies in the end
I'm going to stick my neck out and say I do this as well. Look, WEP is cracked in minutes anyway, why bother? Not all devices on my network support WPA, so that's a no-go. All I know is that running data through an encryption algorithm always slows it down; not sure by how much in the case of a wireless router, but in any case I don't see much point in using WEP anymore. Using a MAC filter at least puts a large roadblock in a would-be thief's way, and requires no configuration on the client machines. I say managing it all in a central location is a good thing. Now, rip me a new one, internet!
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I'd do the same but my router's language has been set to spanish... i could try and change it back but it's more hassle than it's worth
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This advice will not solve the OP's problem, which is far, far more severe than overhead from encryption... it will only worsen their network security.