Slow wireless broadband connection

K

karton2004

Guest
Hi,

I recently got wireless broadband in my house but find the connection speed bery slow. My LAN in work is 2 MBPS and supposedly the wireless broadband is 11MBPS but work is much much quicker!!!! Wireless broadband provider is Eircom, hardware is IBM thinkpad T40 with Intel centrino.

Does anyone have the same problem or anyone have any suggestions as to what I could do to resolve the problem?

Thanks for your help

Karton2004
 
The 11Mbps refers to the speed between your PC/laptop and the wireless device in your house - not the Internet connection itself. Even then, the 11Mbps is split both ways (transmit and receive). But that's probably beside the point.

What kind of download speeds do you get? Not sure if you're just saying things are slow compared to your work environment or if things just feel slow. Which provider are you with and what package did you sign up for?
 
Try bypassing the wireless by plugging in directly with a wire from your PC to your router - this will help you to isolate the problem either to the wireless segment or the broadband connection itself.
 
You need to distinguish between your LAN speed and your internet/broadband speed. Is your work LAN really 2Mbps? It seems very low particularly for a work LAN. Most wired LANs would be 10, 100 or even 1000 Mbps. Wireless LANs would normally be 11Mbps (802.11b) or 54Mbps (802.11a/g). Broadband internet connections would generally be of the order of 128-512Kbps or more. As such your internet connection will usually be the bottleneck in any LAN to internet setup. Note that all of these figures are nominal theoretical maximums and the actual throughput will be (perhaps significantly) lower due to protocol overhead, collisions/retries, interference etc.

As per the previous post you need to investigate your setup and throughput to see if anything is awry. I find [broken link removed] useful for investigating such suspected problems.
 
Thanks all for your replies - up to now its just my "perception" that it is much slower at home - I have up to now been looking for a tool to help me accurately measure what connection speeds I am getting and where. I am going to use the VitalAgent to measure my LAN in work, hardwire connection at home and wireless at home to see if there are actually differences. Will let you know results - thanks again for your help as so far I am very dissappointed with my broadband at home.

Karton2004
 
That speed test reports the following for my connection:

File Size: &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp NaN KB
Time Elapsed: &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp NaN seconds
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
(NaN KBps)
Click to expand...

:eek Faster than the speed of light obviously! No worries though - there are out there if that one doesn't work for others either... :)
 
I might be wrong but I believe this whole broadband speed thing is a misnomer. You share your broadband with 47 other connections which in turn could have one or more pc's connected. So if you're surfing the same time as the others divide 2mbs by 48 and see what your share of the broadband pie is.
Don't know solution, so try surfing in off-peak time and see if there is noticeable improvement. 4am should be could time.
 
Thanks Breeze - I hadn't realised that they were shared - they certainly don't tell you that - I am at home now and tested and it tells me its 753kbps - when I was in work earlier it told me 320kbps but even from opening this page it takes much longer (5 - 10 seconds) to open so I'm not sure what the problem is.

Thanks all for your help

Karton2004
 
[broken link removed] outlines the contention ratios that apply to most or all Irish broadband connections.

If your broadband connection seems to be giving reasonable throughput then it might be time to check your local setup - e.g. , try , check your wireless LAN for configuration problems etc.

One thing that may be different between work and home is that you may be connecting via a caching proxy in the former situation but not in the latter. If your ISP provides a caching proxy then you should used it if possible.
 
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