How can I get the most throughput over wireless?

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Aaron11

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I have a Netgear WNR2000 and my PC is connected wirelessly to it with a Linksys WMP600N at about 40 feet away. I want to know how I should go about on increasing my throughput speeds over wifi. I have tried allowing only N clients and have also look for the best channel in my area (which I think is 3). Whatever I do, my throughput on my PC is at about 7 megabits when I do a speedtest. The max speed I've been able to get on this PC in it's current location is about 1 megabyte/sec at the very most, usually 800-900kbps. When I go through a wired connection I can get 24 megabits over a speedtest and usually 2-2.4 megabytes/sec DL sustained. A far cry from what I currently am getting over wifi from 40 feet from my router. What do you recommend I do to increase the throughput? External antennas are out of the question for the router since it has internal ones. I have however looked at a cantenna. Would this be a wise choice and would it increase my wifi throughput speeds? If not, what do you guys recommend? Thanks for your help in advance. :)
 
Firstly I would start with making sure your router has the most up to date firmware and that your wireless NIC is using the most up to date drivers. I would also disable all firewalls on your PC just to rule it out during testing.

When you say your having slow speeds do you mean LAN transfer speeds or WAN speeds?

Also is your WiFi using a default channel (6)? Are there other networks on the same channel or other wireless devices that could be interfering? What is your signal to noise ratio?

There are a lot of factors in troubleshooting wifi and unfortunately they are not always easy to pinpoint..
 
I'm using the most up-to-date firmware on the router and the newest drivers for the NIC. I have turned off firewalls, but that seems to do nothing to speed. When I mean slow speeds, I mean both the WAN and LAN speeds seem to be slow at the distance I have my computer from the router. I have moved it about 15 feet closer and that has increased the overall throughput speeds a lot. I have my router on channel 3 since that seems to work best in my area (I used site survey on a friends DD-WRT router and found that most were on channels 1,6, or 11). My network is the only one on channel 3, and I seem to get the most range on that channel as well. I'm not that great with networking so I couldn't tell you the signal to noise ratio. As another possibly important note, I realized that the wifi signal actually has to go a little outside of my house before it even gets into the room with my computer in it. Could this cause signal quality diminish and lessen the wireless throughput?
 
It sounds like you have a very high signal to noise ratio, or in simpler terms, dirty signal. This is why when you move close to the router, or even more into the line of sight you get performance that you would expect, however when you move back to where you want to be (which is obstructed) your signal gets dirty again and your speeds suffer.

Take a look at netsumbler http://www.stumbler.net/ or Kismet http://www.kismetwireless.net/ to measure your signal strength and your signal to noise ratio, those little signal bars in windows don't even begin to tell you what kind of signal you have. You could try setting your TX power higher, however this will only allow your router to broadcast further, however your clients antennas may still not be able to transmit back at the same strength thus you will still have some speed issues, though the higher TX transmitting power may clean up your signal a bit.
 
I couldn't get netstumbler working on Windows 7 and I'm not very hands on with Linux so I didn't try out Kismet. I did, however use the Vista/7 alternative to Netstumbler, Vistumbler. It doesn't have a SNR reading, but it said my signal strength was -68db. The routert I have set-up right now doesn't have DD-WRT loaded oni t, and I don't think the WNR2000 supports it anyways. The other two routers (a WRT54GS and an ASUS RT-N16) I set up had DD-WRT loaded on them, and it didn't seem to improve speed when I increased the transmit power.
 
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If I were to get a dual-band router, would I experience better throughput over the 5Ghz band? I know that 5Ghz is more suseptable to interference since it's at a higher frequency, but I thought it might perform better since there isn't anything else in my area using that frequency.
 
5GHz is a greener field - less stuff using it by far. But 5GHz also doesn't travel through solids (walls, etc.) as well. You can try it.

Are you using 40MHz channels?
 
dandragonrage said:
5GHz is a greener field - less stuff using it by far. But 5GHz also doesn't travel through solids (walls, etc.) as well. You can try it.

Are you using 40MHz channels?
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I'm not sure what my Netgear router is using since I don't have DD-wrt on it, but I know that when I tried my cousin's Asus RT-n16 w/ DD-WRT installed and we made sure to put it on 40mhz and it didn't seem to have much of an effect.
 
Aaron11 said:
I'm not sure what my Netgear router is using since I don't have DD-wrt on it, but I know that when I tried my cousin's Asus RT-n16 w/ DD-WRT installed and we made sure to put it on 40mhz and it didn't seem to have much of an effect.
Click to expand...

Needs to be done on clients, too.
 
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