Slow 54Mbps

I've had a D-Link DI-524 802.11g/2.4GHz wireless router for a while although
I've not really used the wireless part aside from an occasional laptop at
home. However, I've now building a Windows 2000 Server to which I've stuck
in a D-Link GWL-G510 PCI 802.11g network card. Working fine except I often
use Acronis True Image to image a server and on just running it, it's
reported nearly one hour to image the C: drive across to my to main PC.

This didn't seem right at all as a previous image across the wired network
took about 4 minutes. I disabled the wireless and re-enabled the wired NIC
and the same image was estimated to take 3 mins.

When I look at the configuration tool, the wireless link rarely goes above
12Mbps and seems to be stuck on 11Mbps. I know that the throughput is never
really 54Mbps but it should be faster than this! The link quality is well
over 90% usually around 98%. The signal strength is full. The server is
actually only two feet away from the access point, actually 2 feet
underneath with a wooden table in the way. Can wireless be too close to each
other?

Cheers, Rob.

 

Do you have either the router or the wireless NIC set to "mixed" or "b"
rather the "g only"? I don't know about D-Link, but IIRC, Linksys
routers default to "mixed mode" (b and g). If you only have one g-mode
client, setting the router to mixed "shouldn't" make a difference, but
I'd double check to see that each end of the link is set to g-only.

 

Do you have either the router or the wireless NIC set to "mixed" or "b"

The router is set to mixed mode. The NIC doesn't have a way of specifying
the type so I assume it's fixed to "g". You can change the TX rate but
that's currently set to auto.

The TX rate does, very rarely, go up and I've seen it once say 54Mbps but
when I'm stressing the link by copying a large file, I kind of expected it
to go up and stay up for a while.

Cheers, Rob.

 

routers default to "mixed mode" (b and g). If you only have one g-mode

I've set the router to "g" mode only to see if that makes any difference.

Cheers, Rob.

 

Make sure you are running the latest firmware for the DI-524.

MD

 

Make sure you are running the latest firmware for the DI-524.

Ahh there in lies a tale I upgraded yesterday to the v1.20 BIOS as I'm
full aware of some of the problems with the firmware on the DI-524 in the
past. I was still running the original BIOS as I had problems when I
upgraded about a year ago. However, v1.20 does appear to be working fine.

Cheers, Rob.

 

I also found that setting up my network for WPA (vs WEP) slowed it down
considerably - something you need to take into account.

MD