Slow Wireless LAN...

Herbal Deity

I have a Netopia 3347W router, which came with Eircom Broadband several years ago. There are several laptops and two desktops in the house which connect to the internet via this router, and thus are all on the same LAN.

I've noticed recently that file transfer between PCs on the LAN is very slow. I seem to get an average of 300 kB/s, no matter what protocol I use.

In contrast, on good days I can download from the internet at 600+ kB/s.

I connected two laptops via ethernet cable to the router and got 15-20 MB/s transferring a file over FTP, which clearly indicated the problem is the wireless.

When I ping the router, I get an average of about 4ms, which seems very high. There's no difference between the laptop being right beside the router or in another room.

The OSs on the network are a mix of XP, Vista, 7 and Ubuntu. There are no firewalls or anti virus software affecting the laptops I tested. There's no difference between the Ubuntu laptop and any other laptop, which demonstrates it's not Spyware or a virus.

I tried channels 7, 10 and 11, and it didn't make a difference. I might do further experimentation with different channels, but I really don't think it's the problem.

I turned off encryption and it didn't do anything.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,
Herbal

Herbal Deity

Seems the 3347W router is only 802.11b, which has a maximum data rate of 11 Mbits/s, which is like 1.4 MB/s. As to transfer between 2 nodes on a LAN requires both nodes to be transmitting, the absolute max data rate one could get would be 700 kB/s. All things considered, an average of 300 kB/s isn't terrible and I wouldn't be interested in increasing it to a meagre 700 kB/s.

Time to buy a new router methinks!

PogMoThoin

Maximum throughput of 802.11b after overheads is around 5Mbit. Get a G router