Explain this...

[sitheris]

Ok I'm testing my wireless network speed - I'm transferring 150 mb of stuff to my server.

Both computers are connected at 48mbps. 48/8 = 6MB/s..........150MB / 6 = 25 sec.

How come the transfer actually took about 8 minutes to complete as opposed to 25 sec. ?

[ktwebb]

Well you don't get 48 Mb throughput. Your signalling rate is that. Protocol and modulation overhead cut that to under half of actual throughput. That's under perfect wireless conditions, which you don't have if your not even associating to the AP at 54 Mbp. The absolute best you could hope for associating at 48Mbps is perhaps 3MB a second.

Obviously your still struggling. I'd look at something like netstumbler for your card to get your signal to noise ratio. Good SNR is critical and my guess is you have some form of interference. Wireless phones, other AP's etc....

If your interested in large file transfers as a norm, then wireless isn't, and never has been, a good choice. Great for internet sharing and light data transfers. Right now your definitely experiencing some packet loss and resends with your data. Just so your aware, you don't get 12.5MB raw transfer rate on a 100Mb switched network. Much more efficient that wireless of course. Anything over 80Mb on consumer wired switching gear and NIC's is doing pretty good. For 802.11g gear, anything over 25Mb is excellent. Since your not getting that the first thing to look for is interference and distance/obstruction issues from AP to client.

[sitheris]

thanks that was good info. I'm sure there's interference somewhere - I live with 3 other guys and we're all a bunch of computer/tech geeks so we have all kinds of wireless devices around here. I can't really do wired b/c the router is on the first floor and my room is on the second floor of our house. And there's not really any room for me to put my server down on the first floor :(

[nameless_centurian]

don't forget about issues with the computer itself. poorly written drivers can slow things down, as can a slow pci bus or a heavily loaded processor.
as mentioned previously, even on a 100mbps WIRED network, you're unlikely to reach near the 100 mbps, and 80 is doing darn well.

summing it up: sometimes slow speeds just come naturally.

edit:

also, the fact that you do have so much wireless activity probably attributes to your slow speeds. on separate channels, the wireless signals may simply interfere with each other on the same frequency, your speed is likely to be less because the bandwidth is shared by all the devices on the network on that channel.