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Trying to get above 4mbps with 802.11b (old equip). Help.

Router: Netgear BEFW11S4, firmware=1.45.10 (802.11b) Client: 2wire Wireless Ethernet Client (802.11b)

Problem: router is one story above client. Exactly above it, give or take 2 feet. The fastest I can get is 4.3mbps. I've tried Channels

1,3,5,6,9,10,11 and 4.2 steady is the best I can get. According to the 2wire manual it can go up to 22, whereas the ancient BEFW11 can go up to 11. Either way, 4 seems really low. I've tried putting the antennas perpendicular to the other, parallel to each other, even both facing straight up and down, both North-South, both East-West. I've tried putting the boxes parallel to each other, perpendicular to each other, even both sitting up & down. No dice. I can get lower speeds, but 4.2 appears to be it.

What should I be trying next? The only wire in the floor (residential house) are the speaker wires in the floor, and I've tried moving a couple feet away from them, no dice.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Reply to
bourgon
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I have a BEFW11S4v4. Piece of junk. Hangs all the time.

Under ideal conditions, 802.11b at 11Mbits/sec will do 5.9Mbits/sec maximum TCP thruput. 4.0 to 4.5 is more typical.

Nope. That's the wireless connection speed. There's all kinds of overhead involved in 802.11 wi-fi. A good rule of thumb is that your TCP thruput will be half your connection speed. You're connecting at

11Mbits/sec so your max thruput is about half that.

All new hardware. Get 802.11g hardware that will do 54Mbits/sec wireless connection speed, and about 22-25Mbits/sec thruput (under ideal conditions).

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Hmmm... wonder if that's the other problem I run into from time to time, where I can't hit the net. I'd thought it was the

Ah. Damn.

Fair enough. Thanks for the help.

Reply to
bourgon

I have one that is about four years old. I don't think it has ever hung. It didn't even blow up with the one test that you said hangs yours all the time. Mine seems like a good stable router. Multiple VPN connections, a little bit of port translation inbound, some gaming trigger ports. It does everything it's supposed to do.

Reply to
dold

snipped-for-privacy@12.usenet.us.com hath wroth:

Miracles happen. Is yours a v1, v2, v3, v3.2 or v4? As I understand it, only the v4 mutation tends to hang. v2 seems to blow up after a few years but doesn't hang. No experience or history on the others.

Also, try the router exploits test. My BEFW11S4v4 hangs on two of the tests. Methinks targa3 was one of the problem tests. I forgot the other one.

I lied, slightly. I "retired" my BEFW11S4v4 about 6 months ago because I got tired of the weirdness. It's sitting in a pile somewhere in my palatial office waiting for a good excuse to send it as a burnt offering to the radio gods.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

BEFW11S4v4

I ran all that junk. No hangs.

I can certainly believe that you have a bad one. I don't have a bad one. It has been powered up constantly except for site moves for years.

Reply to
dold

snipped-for-privacy@12.usenet.us.com hath wroth:

Same as what I have. I sold mine to a customer when new. He got tired of the tendency to hang or not allow new connections, so he demanded that I get him something else. That was a Netgear WGR614 which has been working fine for about 2 years. I used this BEFW11S4v4 for about a year at my house, with erratic hangs.

I also had customers with BEFW11S4v4 routers that have been problems. I'm guessing, but I think there were a total of 3 of these that I replaced with different models. I didn't keep or want the old routers. There have also been similar complaints in this newsgroups about BEFW11S4 oddities. I've been through at least 3 firmware updates on mine, none of which offered or exhibited an improvement. I just got a newer firmware version from Linksys, but don't have time to do testing immediately, or have a live system on which to try it. We'll see if that helps, but later.

Incidentally, at one point, Staples was selling these router for $10 each. Don't ask why I'm spending time working on an obsolete router worth $10.

Amazing. Every one that I replaced failed the exploits tests. Mine would also hang consistently on streaming video. There must be something different about yours. My guess(tm) is that there are manufacturing or die lot differences in the chipsets used.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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