Wireless/Wired speed differences

Questions:

Why is it that if I plug in my RJ port to my router, I can download at 300 KB/s, but if I take that out and turn on my wireless, I download at 150 KB/s?

In theory, the wireless should be able to do just as well as the ethernet for internet applications.

The signal is excellent and I'm at a pretty constant 54 Mbps. Doesn't make sense to me....

 

Well, i am not entirely sure, but wireless is generally half the speed of a lan cable. Cable - 100 mbps. Most Wireless G - 54 mbps.

But i see what you are saying as internet speeds i think have a cap of about 10 mbps, and still doesn't even reach that. Even wireless B is about that speed. So the wireless shouldn't "seem" to be slower even though we see that it is.

Weird.

 

when i download via Wifi i get about the same speeds as on my desktop...give or take 30Kbps.

 

Same here, I've noticed little if any difference verus wired and wireless although I have done a lot of tweaking with my settings to remove the limits that XP imposes. There are several tcp tweaking programs that do a good job, there are also several registry tweaks that can be done in a few minutes to improve performance. Also, wep and wpa can affect speeds although I'm using wpa and have no trouble with dl speeds. It could be a matter of updating your wifi cards drivers or updating your routers firmware.

 

I have Adelphia's Premier service (6MB down) and I don't get any drop in speed. I'm using a Linksys WRT54 v2.2 Wireless Router connected to my ISP provided cable modem (Motorolla 5100 Surf Modem) and a Linksys Wireless G PCI-Card on my desktop. Neither my desktop nor my laptop have any kind of Cat-5 direct connection to the router.

 

Nacho,

Do you have WPA enabled on your router/notebook? If so, this will actually decrease performance by as much as approx 25% (if I remember correctly). Each packet needs to be encrypted and then authenticed/decrypted and this will slow down performance.

Another thing to check is to make sure you don't have any other wireless devices connected (802.11b) as this will drop your entire 54G network performance down to 11B speeds (network is as fast as your slowest connection). If you don't, check your router to make sure you have set it so that it only supports G cards. By default, most are set to B+G support.

So, try disabling all security/encryption as a quick test, and also verify the B+G support option I mentioned above.

-Vb-

 

Yea that would make sence if the WPA encryption would increase security, but decrease the speed.

 

Ok, will try. Thanks for the suggestions!

 

If it turns out that you are getting a noticeable performance hit with security enabled even with everything updated and performance is something you don't want to sacrifice then a good alternative is disabling SSID broadcast and enabling MAC filtering. Better to have all three, but a little is better than none at all. Good luck and let us know how you make out.