Belkin N1 card slow

I got a new Belkin N1 PC card to go with my new Belkin N1 wireless router. This card takes over 60 sec to figure out it's network connections when the laptop boots, way much longer than my old "b" card ever did.

Also signal strength (poor) and throughput (~39 Mbps) does not come close to advertised specs. If I run the laptop in the same room as the router I do get the 300 Mbps and fulll signal strength advertised. The best advice Belkin could give was to change the broadcast channel on the router. That didn't change anything. There are no other wireless users anywhere near me anyway.

Has anyone else had these long initialization times and poor performance with these new N wireless card/router combinations?

Geoff

Reply to
geoff
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On Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:14:06 -0400, geoff wrote in :

  1. Wireless signals don't penetrate walls well under the best of circumstances, and some walls are worse than others.
  2. There are many sources of Wi-Fi radio interference.

Read the wikis below.

Reply to
John Navas

geoff hath wroth:

That's about normal for a poor signal strength. If there are errors during the initial negotiation, the wireless client oftens issues a disconnect and starts over from scratch. It should be somewhat faster with a strong signal.

Your mileage may vary. If you had purchased a generic 802.11g system, your maximum TCP thruput would be about 25Mbits/sec.

Are you really getting 300Mbits/sec thruput? The Belkin N1 does not have a gigabit ethernet interface, and is therefore limited to

100Mbits/sec thruput to an external server or client. How are you measuring your thruput?

Methinks you might be asking the wrong question. Perhaps "Has anyone obtained 300Mbits/sec through an unspecified number of walls and with poor signal strength"? The basic problem is the signal strength which is apparently a function of the walls and the range. High speeds require large signal to noise ratios which implies a strong signal. You're not going to get that going even through one wall.

If you dig through the review of the Belkin N1 at:

you'll find a graph of thruput versus range at:

Looks like it maxes out at 60Mbit/sec and compares badly with other MIMO devices. It really screws up in the upload test, where it maxes out at 40Mbits/sec. It also can't handle more than a few simultaneous connections. Read the article and decide for yourself.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Jeff Liebermann hath wroth:

(...)

Also see:

"Draft 802.11n Revealed: Part 1 - The Real Story on Throughput vs. Range."

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

from scratch.

I'll have to try booting in the same room.

I'm just going by what the software reports. 300Mbs may be a pipe dream, you're right. Even so, whatever I get is better than 11Mbs on the old b card.

Not much to decide. I have what I have. Belkin gave me the silly thing! I've been having problems with their routers and they keep sending me new ones. Finally they sent me an N1 and my laptop's internal "b" card just wouldn't connect with it. So they sent the "N" PC card to make me happy. It does connect, but I was surprised at how long it takes to do it.

Thanks for the links.

Geoff

Reply to
geoff

On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 06:09:06 -0500, geoff wrote in :

the initial

from scratch.

right. Even

The software is reporting the maximum raw data rate, not the actual throughput under load.

Reply to
John Navas

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