Wifi - I want more speed!

[alexander72]

I read this as wifey needs more speed....... Double doh.,,, my wifi is quite quick here on Oxfordshire

[Bubba]

Thanks for all the advice it's been really useful. I have the following setup, mac time capsule which runs 5 and 2.4ghz this is hard wired to my sky wireless router. I have a netgear wifi range extender ( which I switched off for now as I thought this may cause the issues) I have 2 MacBooks, 3 iPads, 2 iPhones, 2 sky boxes, 2 win 7 laptops an HP wireless printer, Apple TV and a Smart TV.

I had a look yesterday and tried to sort using a combination of istumbler, net analyzer, airport utilities and a bit of common sense. All of the devices were using 11n but on 2.4ghz so I upgraded the time capsule firmware to the latest version and reconfigured the to use a static IP. I could then run the MacBooks on 5ghz and over wifi started getting a whopping 61mb/s when I was getting 71mb/s over the wire. I disabled remote play on the PS3 and then decided to hard wire anything I could into a 8 port gigabit switch. There's little point in using wifi when they are in the same location after all!

I have done it now and there was still a challenge around co channel interference where my neighbours sky and bright box routers were bleeding signal so I checked the channels and set my sky router as far away as possible. I have seen great improvements here now and I also found our MacBooks were hammering the network every hour using time machine so changed that to run daily early in the morning. My last tasks are to move the time capsule upstairs (connected via a gigabit powerline adapter) to my study and switch off the wifi on my printer for now and run it wired.

My broadband and home network is running so much better and really chuffed with it.

What is annoying is that when we bought the house the developer would not let me run network cables to each room, the gits!

[Blatman]

connected via a gigabit powerline adapter

Which ones?

As for the range extender, you lose 50% of the bandwidth for every wireless bridge hop your traffic has to make.

Time capsule and other "cloud" backups, Apple or otherwise (Dropbox / Sky Drive etc) often connect to the network / internet more often than many people think, and move more data than many people realise.

I use wireless as little as possible...

[Truly Skint]

Blatman, regarding your comment "wireless is the bane of my life", if you are involved with networking at all, forgive me but I don't know what your profession is,  and you really hate wireless, we should talk. I sell a single channel technology, manufactured by Meru and believe me, I have never experienced anything like it before. I have sold networking related products for most of my career and always stayed away from wireless until now. Believe me, it just works, and incredibly well. I would add...in the corporate market space !! Look at this link for an overview of the technology and how it differs from traditional micro-cell wireless.

 

 If you are interested in talking further, I can be contacted at mburns@adanetworks.com

Do you have wireless G or wireless N access point(s) / router?

Do ALL hosts have wireless N capability, and do ALL of them have it enabled? Remember if you have a single wireless G device on the network the access point will be forced to run wireless G for every other device even though they may have N capability. A single wireless B device will drag the whole thing down to 11Mb/s,and that's before we account for the overhead of security etc.Turning off security may help, but unless you're planning on not using security, leave it in place so you know what you're actually getting when in normal use.

 

Are the other devices silent when you run the speed test? You'd be surprised at how many "apps" hold an open connection that soaks up bandwidth.

 

Are you getting interference from a neighbour, or possibly another wireless device or home appliance using the same frequency? Cordless phones, baby monitors, wireless alarm systems and just about anything else that has "wireless" in it's name may cause interference. No doubt someone will shout "microwave oven" some time soon. Yes I know, but unless you're actually using it, it's not an issue. Normal mobile phones shouldn't affect the result, but don't use them for testing either. Use a PC / Mac, and use more than one browser 'cos they all handle flash / Java slightly differently and this can also affect the results in some cases.

.

Check the actual throughput of your wireless router. Full wireless N is rated for 300Mb/s. Early wireless N was rated at 108Mb/s, but remember it's half duplex so you'll "see" a max of 150Mb/s (full N) or 54Mb/s (early N) *before* network overhead is accounted for.

And remember, the further away from the source signal the slower it will be, and it's a non linear relationship.

 

I have found that speeds on a ping test can be very erratic on a laptop when it's on battery power. Plug it in to the mains and they speed up and even out massively. I have repeated this test many times and it has held true every time. I suspect the same thing might skew the speed test results too. I believe it has to do with how battery powered devices manage their power usage.

 

Do you have the name and model number of the wireless router or access point you are using?

 

Wireless is the bane of my life...

[Blatman]

You have PM...