Speed difference between Bridging & Routing?

[Dougal]

Hello there,
My setup consists of a WAR brd located in an outhouse along with a Network Attached Storage drive connected to ether1. My internet connection is wireless into wpci1 and I connect to wpci2 as an AP.

My question is, I've bridged wpci2 and ether1 so I can access the NAS wirelessly, but the upload/download speed to the NAS is quite slow, around 1mb/s. Do you think it could be because of the bridge configuration, would it be faster if it was routed somehow?

Would any of you have any ideas how I could speed it up?

Thanks!

[nickwhite]

What kind of signal do you have to the Access Point? Also what form of wireless: 11b, 11g, or 11a?

[butchkemper]

The limiting factor for the transmission speed is going to be the transfer rate over the wireless connection. You should not see any speed difference between a bridged and routed connection between the ethernet with the NAS device and the wireless AP card.

Butch

[Dougal]

Well I've the wpci2 ( the one that I connect to and thats bridged to the NAS) configured as 11b. Even with the 11mb/s spec on the 'b' you'd think that I'd be getting a little faster transfer than 1mb/s. My signal quality is at 100%, Signal strength: -55

Maybe I should try the wpci2 in 'g' mode?

[Dougal]

Well guys, I've tried it in both 'g' and mixed mode, but funny things started happening to the other machines connected to the AP (wpci2). I've 2 Mac's, an iMac & macbook & a dell pc, only the macbook would remain connected to the AP after I changed the setting from b to either mixed or g modes. The iMac would connect intermittently, while the dell not at all. It's like there was some kind of interference going on, but I didn't change channels. I've left it back in the 'b' mode now and everything 's back to normal.

Any theories?

Thanks

[ninedd]

the upload/download speed to the NAS is quite slow, around 1mb/s...Hi, are you saying 1 Mbit / second or 1MBYTE / second?

[rebel2234]

Hi, are you saying 1 Mbit / second or 1MBYTE / second?

I would guess that he is saying 1Mbit/sec because 1Mbyte/sec over a b connection is pretty slim chance. In my experience anyway.. Ive seen 5 steady on some testing Ive done with spikes to 6+.

Dougal,

What kind of card are you using in your WAR? What are you using for an antenna on your AP? Its been my experience with laptops (given their small gain internal antenna) that they do not perform well over any kind of distance. Also I would try changing channels on the AP card, It shouldnt hurt anything, if its just computers associated to the radio. You said wpci1 is the uplink to your ISP is it on the same channel as wpci2? Also dont skimp on the pigtails, I bought some chepos once, never again.

"buy nice or buy twice" :D
good luck

[ninedd]

I would guess that he is saying 1Mbit/sec because 1Mbyte/sec over a b connection is pretty slim chance. In my experience anyway.. Ive seen 5 steady on some testing Ive done with spikes to 6+.Yea - I figured so as well, but wanted to make sure. I've seen people chasing their tails to solve a problem that doesn't exist before. :) Someone sees explorer report an 800KB download speeds and think that's ''not quite 1Mbit'' because they've just done the math wrong. In this case, that's probably NOT the issue, but I wanted to ask. :)

[Dougal]

Hmmm, maybe I did do some of the math wrong. When I transfer a file of say 1GB size over the wireless lan to the NAS, if I watch the progress bar in OS X or Windoze, it transfers at about 500Kilobytes per second. I would have expected much quicker than that. The AP is setp in a 'B' configuration, and there is good seperation between the channels, the wpci1 (incoming from wisp) is on 2437 and the wpci2 (my AP) is on 2457

I thought the problem was the fact that wpci2 was bridged to ether1 to which my NAS is connected, and that it should be routed, but I wasn't sure how to do that kind of route so I bridged them.

Maybe it's something I've gotta live with :(

Cheers,
Dougal

[Dougal]

Actually guys I forgot to specify my cards, it's a WAR4 with CM9 cards

Dougal

[oscarBravo]

...it transfers at about 500Kilobytes per second. That's 4Mbit/s, including TCP overhead. What made you think you'd get more than that from an 11Mbit/s half-duplex 802.11b connection?

[Dougal]

Well I suppose it was lack of knowledge made me think it, hence my posting.

How do you arrive at that conclusion, that it equates 4Mbit/s Incl overheads?

Thanks
Dougal

[tog]

8 bits in a byte:
500,000 bytes times 8 (to convert to bits) is 4 million, AKA 4 megabits.

If your signal is -55 you should be able to do full 54mbit 802.11g just fine which would triple or quadruple your speed even to non-atheros clients. I would investigate a bit more why 802.11g mode isn't working if I were you.

I haven't tried a large number of different types of clients or anything, but I have successfully connected a few different non-atheros laptop wifi clients to a StarV3 AP in 802.11g mode without any trouble including broadcom and intel clients.

You might try without WEP for testing or use WEP open system on the StarV3 AP rather than WEP shared-key which is usually a pain to get random standard wifi clients connected to because the option to change to shared-key auth with many wifi clients' software is 8 menus deep if it's even offered at all.

[Dougal]

Thanks for that Tog, makes sense now. I kinda knew those facts but never put it all together, but now that you did it, thanks. I'll investigate again why the g mode caused havoc, i'd like to use them at their max capacity, but I have an old IBM 'stink'pad there too and that only has B compatability, but mabye I should just ditch it and try go with the 'g' again. I'll let you know how I get on. ( I'm kinda dead in the water tho till the weekend since an ether1 port stopped working, gotta swap it over to 2)

Thanks again,
Dougal

[HoeDing]

Thanks for that Tog, makes sense now. I kinda knew those facts but never put it all together, but now that you did it, thanks. I'll investigate again why the g mode caused havoc, i'd like to use them at their max capacity, but I have an old IBM 'stink'pad there too and that only has B compatability, but mabye I should just ditch it and try go with the 'g' again. I'll let you know how I get on. ( I'm kinda dead in the water tho till the weekend since an ether1 port stopped working, gotta swap it over to 2)

Thanks again,
Dougal

Chances are that the wifi card on the IBM is mini-pci so I would just swap it out for a CM9.

[tog]

Yeah, replace the minipci card if you can with a CM9. Otherwise find a good atheros PCMCIA wifi client card. I even do that to modern laptops. We were trying to play a LAN game (which requires a good 10 - 60 minutes of uninterrupted network connectivity per game) with a friend's Intel minipci wireless card and its connection kept dying so I put a CM9 in it. My minipci express Intel wifi in my laptop is dropping constantly, too. I have a minipci express atheros card on order. Intel's wifi cards suck so much. In fact most wifi client adapters or minipci cards that either come with laptops or can be purchased retail suck horribly.

When asked, I always describe three levels of wifi clients:
1. "Atheros"

2. Works-ok un-special receive sensitivity, but relatively reliable stuff. Broadcom wifi so far is the only thing I've found that qualifies. Their 11g stuff mostly seems to work without complaint or irritation.

3. "WTF is that?" 90% of what's out there qualifies for this category, including most of the wifi stuff you buy from Linksys and Netgear and similar companies as well as everything I've seen so far that comes with every laptop that isn't from Apple. (Apple uses Atheros!)

As a side note, if you're looking to purchase a standard retail wifi client adapter, D-Link has the highest concentration of Atheros wireless APs and clients, but not all of their wifi products are Atheros so you have to check before you buy. Trendnet (I know, "Who is Trendnet?") also has a lot of Atheros stuff.

[nickwhite]

Trendnet (I know, "Who is Trendnet?") also has a lot of Atheros stuff.I'm pretty sure those were my exact words. :) Surprisingly their stuff is cheap and still pretty reliable. Their USB WiFi devices come in handy too. I think they make a standalone wifi-finder, in which you can pull off the end/case and it turns into a USB wifi device. Kind of neat.

[Dougal]

You know, I wondering about that. Sometimes I'd have both laptops with me in the car, the thinkpad and the macbook, and when I run netstumbler and macstumbler, the macbooks sees wireless points that the thinkpad deosn't even get wind of. it's waaay more sensitive that the thinkpad. I checked last night - there's some kind of 3Com minipci in the thinkpad, but my hands are a little tied with regard changing it, cos the card is linked into the wep setup for the place I work. But I could try :) I'd love to use the g facility of the WAR, but before I do any more work on that I've to investigate a dead ether1 socket, but I can't get at it till Saturday. Interesting conversation this!

Dougal

[HoeDing]

On several occasions in different cities I have had my laptop side by side to a friends machine and it always ends up like this "wow, you can see a lot more AP's than I can!". This is using the standard antenna in my notebook and an Atheros mini pci express card. :) At some point when I have free time (hah!) I am going to install a bulkhead connector on the the IO side of my notebook for an external antenna just 'cuz. :) If you have a newer laptop that doesn't use mini-pci, the only supplier that I could get of mini pci expresscards have been PCD global (and they ship in single quantities for a reasonable price!) http://www.pcdglobal.com/wireless.php#mini-pciModules (WLL4080PCIX)