802.11g not a bottleneck?

[Yoyoson]

I've heard people proclaim this and I've told other people this as well:

"The bandwidth of your 802.11g wireless (54 MBits/sec?) is much larger than the bandwidth of your cable/DSL (3-5 Mbits/sec), so there should be no loss of internet download speed if you switch to wireless."

However, I've found that this is not the case with my laptop. The wireless seems to be half as slow (or worse) than the wired connection. I've been running speed tests on my laptop, and I get about 5.5 MBits if I hook up an ethernet cable. I get 1.7-3.3 MBits through the wireless adapter. I know that speedtests aren't the best for getting accurate numbers, but the I'm just using it to compare my ethernet against my wireless.

I get about the same results when my laptop (an IBM X41) is 1 foot, 3 feet, or 6 feet away from my router (a Belkin). Windows' Firewall is active on both the ethernet and wireless.

What could possibly be slowing things down? Is there an easy way to gauge the wireless adapter's max speed ( just across my LAN, not across the internet )? Does the above proclamation represent the sound logic of a person who just doesn't have all the facts?

 

[spidey07]

could be interferrence. try different chnnls - 1,6,11.

 

[WackyDan]

Wireless does introduce latency as well. But as stated above, I'd look for interference from household 2.4ghz phones, and check to see how many other wireless AP's are near you -Both broadcasting and hidden.

 

[Madwand1]

While typical wireless bandwidth is not going to come close to the advertised 54 Mb/s maximum speed, it can typically hit up to around 20 Mb/s, which is enough to be significantly higher than typical consumer internet bandwidth at this time.

You can measure bandwidth point to point in your network using a number of tools. I used a version of the open source TTCP these days: http://www.pcausa.com/Utilities/pcattcp.htm

AT and others have used an older Microsoft NT version of the same tool, NTTTCP, which is no longer available from Microsoft. There are some differences in options. Here's a link to AT's usage and their settings:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2696&p=11

Alternatively, you can just trigger a transfer somehow, and measure the performance using the built-in PerfMon. Or you can just add a counter to XP/2003's networking tab in Task Manager for bytes sent / received, and observe it directly per second (never change the refresh frequency; it might not be easy to force it back to refreshing every second).

TTCP is a "purer" tool that doesn't include disk performance, and though it's at the IP level and not lower, it is generally useful.

My own internet bandwidth is nominally 3 Mb/s max, and more typically around 2.5 Mb/s. I've recently tested wired vs. wireless performance on 802.11g. I used Speakeasy and a support ftp download from IBM to test. I've seen significant variability, going as low as 1 Mb/s, however, I've also hit 2.4-2.5 Mb/s regularly, which means that I don't see your problem. But I have a lower internet bandwidth.