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Poor throughput w/strong signal 801.11b

I have a 3 year old Thinkpad w/ built in wireless that has good sensitivity but probably runs 11.b. Works find at home where there are no 2.4GHz phones. :) When I go to a vacation rental condo or coffee shop, I quite often get very poor performance even when there is a strong enough signal to get 11Mb data rate. Of course these are environments where I have no control over the wireless router or the

2.4GHz phones, etc. The worst performance comes when I try to download e-mail from yahoo into Modzilla Thunderbird. I think this may be due to very high error rate caused by interference from other 2.4GHz equipment but do not know how to find that out from XP Pro networking utilities.

Other users near me in the condo or coffee shop report no problem, great performance. One of these users suggested I get an 11g card. On the surface, the idea that 11Mb is the bottle neck for Internet data seems doubtful. However, the notion that 11g may function in a way making it less suceptable to interference is the question here. What do you think?

If you think 11g would help my situation, do you think that there are any advantages in the more expensive 11g products or is a base card as good as any for my situation?

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Reply to
longtom
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[cross-posted to comp.sys.laptops.thinkpad]

On Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:59:02 -0500, longtom wrote in :

What ThinkPad? What is the name of the wireless adapter in Device Manager? How do you know the sensitivity is good?

What does fine mean? Over what distance? At what speed? To what wireless access point or router?

How do you know how strong the signal is? How do you know performance is poor? Is the poor performance the wireless, or the Internet?

First check for packet loss to the email server with 'ping' or 'tracert'.

More than doubtful -- simply not true.

That is doubtful -- both use the same frequency.

I think it's possible your antenna might have become disconnected, which would account for poor performance. You might want to try an inexpensive returnable G PC Card to see if it works better.

Reply to
John Navas

Thank you for responding to my questions. Thinkpad is an R40 running XP Pro SP 2, 800Mb memory, Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini Driver dated 3/7/2003, version 1.1.5. The wireless icon in the lower right system tray shows "Speed: 11Mb, Signal Strength: Very Good" The network status popup shows 4 bars (out of 5) of signal strength.

Works fine at home(definition): Works such that I don't notice any difference between the laptop and my desktop machine (doing e-mail downloads from Yahoo to Modzilla Thunderbird) that is ethernet connected to the Netgear switching hub, wireless router. Have signal strength "very good" (4-5 bars), reports the same speed (11Mb) that seems similar to what I get in public places. Distance in public places is unknown. At home it is

Reply to
longtom

On Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:42:51 -0500, longtom wrote in :

4 bars is good, but the 11 Mbps connect speed is pretty meaningless.

Don't notice doesn't mean much -- iperf speed tests would be much better.

Sounds like possible packet loss.

Think is just speculation -- try "tracert" to your email server to see if and where packet loss is occurring.

Try "tracert" instead of "ping".

Do this first.

g versus b probably won't make a difference.

Reply to
John Navas
[cross-posted to comp.sys.laptops.thinkpad]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:53:17 GMT, John Navas wrote in :

Reply to
John Navas

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