I have been having trouble getting a decent Internet speed when being connected to the router/ap via a wireless connection. Its been feeling very much like dialup.
I wondered about the speed about a month ago, so I visited the plusnet speed tester and got a speed of 327.1 over wireless, at this time the router was plugged into in my living room on a little table under an alcove behind the living room door.
Two weeks ago I was trying to download the latest UDP driver set for my nVidia nForce based motherboard and I was getting ridiculously low download speeds, so I moved the router/ap from its place on the little table so that it was sitting in the doorway instead. I didn't remember to try the bandwidth test again.
Last week I tried streaming radio from last.fm, but it was not very successful and kept cutting out. The router and the PC had been on for quite a while so I unplugged the router and reset the PC and re-plugged in the router. I was then able to stream the audio without any dropouts.
--------------------------------------------------------------- ____ { AP } {____}
------------------------------------------------------------ D | O | O | PC R |
This Sunday I again tried to stream from last.fm and again it started cutting out. I tried the same process as last time but it did not work this time.
So I then connected the router directly via the switch to my PC and tried the streaming again and it was successful.
I had not yet upgraded the router as netgear suggested that until the latest firmware was loaded that it was not possible to upgrade the router wirelessly.
As it was now connected directly I upgraded the firmware of the router (Netgear DG834G) hoping that this would improve the wireless performance. I upgraded the firmware from version 1.03 to version 1.05 and then ran the plusnet bandwidth test and got 462.7 kbps (still directly connected).
Then tonight I set the router and PC back to using the wireless connection and then tried the plusnet bandwidth test and got values between 43.1 and 80kbps.
I know I should have done this step by step testing the bandwidth between each stage so that I would have a clearer knowledge of how any changes affect download speed but I didn't think of it at the time.
The connection speed indicated when hovering over the wireless icon in the status bar varies from 36Mbps to 54Mbps and Signal strength of between Good and Excellent depending on how the router is feeling despite no change in the routers position. Even when it is showing a
54Mbps connection the speed is still terrible.My Internet connection is only 0.5Mbps so it seems strange that it can't cope.
Here are the statistics that the upgraded firmware now supplies
Port Status TxPkts RxPkts Collisions Tx B/s Rx B/s Up Time WAN PPPoA 7992 11160 0 51 819 03:29:09 LAN 100M/Full 6517 0 0 36 0 03:29:23 WLAN 54M 16157 8352 0 824 64 03:29:15
ADSL Link Downstream Upstream Connection Speed 576 kbps 288 kbps Line Attenuation 49 db 27.5 db Noise Margin 25 db 28 db The channel is currently set to 11 with broadcast name set to disabled, mode is set to "g only" and I am using WEP authentication and the wireless card is a LinkSys WMP54G
Any Ideas?