Sloooooow wireless file transfers

Posted by: Jonathan Gorse on 28 March 2006

Hi,

I have just bought a Freecom 250GB network hard drive to connect to my wireless access point and cable router. The Laptop has a 802.1g wirelss card and the router is a Linksys WAP54G model which is supposed to provide 54MB/sec transfer speeds (I'm the only user on the lan)

I have connected the Freecom external hard drive to my Linksys cable router which supports 100MB ethernet via a cabled connection.

I've just tried to send 1.2GB of photos from my laptop hard drive across the wireless network to the new external hard drive and I'm still here 57 minutes later - carrier pdegeon would be faster!!

Any idea why my wireless network which Windows reports as giving me 48-54 MB/sec and a 'very good' connection is taking so long to send some photos across??

IT apparently comprised 3 000 000 packets, only a few were dropped and it took 1hr 17 mins to transfer the files.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Jonathan
Posted on: 28 March 2006 by Jay
Heavy air Johnathan.

You'll find most of those speeds have been quoted at altitude you see. Everything goes faster at altitude because there's less resistance.
Posted on: 28 March 2006 by Sir Cycle Sexy
Jonathan,

Does your laptop detect any adjacent wireless networks?

You'll never measure 50 odd Mbits/s transferred as the connection incurs overheads largely to ensure transmission integrity and can further incur latency from security encryption. However it should still shift at about one fifth the speed of 100 base wire.

1.2 * 1024 is 1228MB which * 8 gives 9830Mbits. Assuming 20Mbits/s that’s about 500 seconds or eight minutes to move your photos so I’m wondering if your kit is fighting for free transmission slots.

Might be worth verbally asking your neighbours if they have wifi as service set broadcast ID can be disabled rendering adjacent wireless networks invisible.

C
Posted on: 29 March 2006 by garyi
I would be interested in the outcome of this as I have spotted a device which will allow my standard external harddrive to go network, which would be very handy for me.
Posted on: 29 March 2006 by Jonathan Gorse
Sir Cycle

This is very interesting because my neighbour across the road does have wireless and it shows up at 48% strength on my Linksys site survey whereas my own network is at 91%.

Not sure how I can change the service set ID - any idea where that option is. I thought there must be something wrong for it to be so slow and am grateful for your comments.

Let me know what to try next.

Thanks,

Jonathan
Posted on: 29 March 2006 by AV@naim
Try changing the wireless channel number to something obscure, say 1 or 13. This makes for less traffic on one particular channel.

(A lot of people leave the default setting SSID and channel when setting up. So if you are on the same channel as your neighbour, this may account for some of it).

As Sir Sexy has already stipulated, your 54Mbit/sec router is probably running about half that in reality. There is a program that allows you to measure this properly, I am trying to remember what its called...

For comparison:

My Belkin MIMO 8230 router is supposed to be 120+Mbit sec transfer. This never reaches above 40Mbit/sec. I can transfer 1GB in about 15-20min with my setup. Note also that distance causes transfer rate to drop