Wireless much slower than ethernet ?

[whiz]

Hi All,
A friend of mine has just set up his laptop to run wirelessly. The laptop is the only compuer he uses and is using a Thomson Speedtouch router to access AOL. Before he got the wireless connection up and running his lappy was loading web pages very quickly but now on the wireless connection his load speed has dropped to such an extent that he's considering going back to hard wired internet access. Is there anything that would cause the connection to slow so significantly ?
Thanks in advance

[Bushfiva]

Yes, wireless is much slower. Using any form of security drops it by about 60% from nominal speed in real life. Signal interference/distance from the antenna drops it further. However, it should still be no slower than a UK ADSL connection. You'd notice the slowness on local file copies across the network.

Check signal strength and negotiated speed.

[Saab Dastard]

Bushfiva,

I agree overall with what you say - however, I don't believe that the impact of encryption is quite as high as you suggest.

The most resource-intensive is WPA, followed by WEP, then WPA2. The last is best, mainly because the spec. calls for the encryption to be done at a hardware level.

I would also suspect firmware and driver issues - both at the router and the NIC.

Possibly also worth checking that the connection is to the right wifi network! :O

SD

[liam548]

It is slower but not by that much.

It should be hardly noticeable.

Liam

[Bushfiva]

I stick by my statement. Let's take 802.11g, the 54 Mbps standard. Let's say you're connecting it to a 100 Mbps wired network. The 802.11g workgroup itself says net throughput will be around 19 Mbps. On my own wireless network, I measure 22 Mbps. Since my internet connection is currently 200 Mbps spec, 110 MBps actual, wireless is no good for me.

802.11n workgroup reckons typical 74 Mbps on a 300 Mbps network. That means the domestic backbone must be gigabit. Most people don't have that yet.

I agree that, in the UK, most people will not notice a problem surfing the internet. But elsewhere, 802.11g doesn't hack it.

Wireless is always slower. Let's put it another way. Imagine wireless came first. Suddenly, someone offers a hardware hack that costs less than $10, weighs less than 100g, increases your privacy and increases network speed threefold. That person would make a fortune: the cat5 cable.

[Saab Dastard]

Bushfiva,

I think that we are talking about slightly different things - you are looking at the total loss over wireless, I am just looking at the difference in loss between encrypted and unencrypted.

I can well believe that the total loss of an encrypted wifi link is 60%.

The maximum capacity of a shared half-duplex wired ethernet network is - at best - 2/3 the nominal capacity. This does increase to about 80% in a full-duplex switched environment - which a wifi network can never be.

SD

[Keef]

I tried the ADSL speed test with my laptop wired to the router, and then via wireless. This is using nominal 8 meg ADSL (the UK telephone "standard"). The wireless is using 64-bit WEP.

On download, I got about 7 Mb/s wired, and about 5 using 802.11g. The up channel seemed to be the same with either. The results have been consistent whenever I've tried it.

I suspect the difference would be more dramatic if I had 100Mb/s broadband - I should be so lucky!

[twiggs]

Maybe the problem is no security at all.
If they removed security when setting up the wireless connection, they may now be inadvertently supplying broadband to all their neighbours as well. (or to all the crew in the nearby crew hotel ;))

[whiz]

Hi twiggs,
I can verify security is definitely on as this was one of the problems he caused when setting the wireless connection up. Somehow he managed to have about 5 different passwords with 5 different WEP keys :\

[Well Travelled Nav]

If you don't want to use the security functions, most decent routers allow you to set up access control.

This limits access to the router to specified unique MAC addresses. That is you get a list of MAC addresses from all the network/wifi cards that need to access the router. Then enter this list into the router and even though there is no WPA/WPSK encoding then your router is still secure.

WTN

[Saab Dastard]

even though there is no WPA/WPSK encoding then your router is still secure.

I have to take issue with that - it is very easy to spoof a MAC address.

Unencrypted network means a wifi packet analyser can read all the packets, then it is trivial to obtain the MAC address and voila - access granted.

Even WEP adds a layer of encryption to break (relatively easily). For proper security, WPA2 is the best - WPA is much better than WEP, but still vulnerable to determined hackers.

SD

[Paul Sanders]

Mine too typical ain't it

[icemel_aratt]

If hes got a cordless phone nearby that won't help. lots of interference with those.