You can give yourself a little wifi performance boost by disabling mixed mode and going to G only. Also temporarily disabling encryption. Perhaps switching to a channel with less interference. How modern are these computers youre testing with? You could be CPU bound too.
No encryption is being used, but I’ll try with G only.
CPU: Fastest is Celeron 2.53Ghz, 1GB RAM
No interference (no signals anywhere near), chans 1, 6 or 11 – same result. 7 out of 8 bars on receiving end, stats display claims 54Mb, full speed is available.
I tried a peer-to-peer test with large files, with and without simultaneous Internet traffic, and the best composite speed I can get is just under 10Mb, although this may be limited by the slower computer (slower CPU and disk). Still, that points to the Linksys as the bottleneck. Wireless display says it is 30-50% of max (for the receiving card) at the 8Mb level.
OK, I tried it with the fastest machine. I selected the 20/5 speed range (20/2 isn’t available), and let it tweak the settings.
No change. Both the Verizon and the Speakeasy tests returned the same results before and after the Verizon tweak. And again after I restored the default settings.
I don’t know what FIOS is, but I suspect it is something that works only with Verizon customers, which leaves me out.
BTW, the Verizon test reported 2.2Mb DL, 1.4 UL (optimized or not), which is much poorer than other tests and way below what this equipment is capable of.
Just tried setting the Linksys to G mode only. Perhaps a 5% improvement, but no more.
>I tried a peer-to-peer test with large files, with and without simultaneous Internet traffic, and the best composite speed I can get is just under 10Mb,
Yeah, sounds like youre really hitting the max speed of your wireless interface. Ive played with wireless and iperf quite a bit and have never gotten more than 12 mbps with 54g and thats sitting 6 inches from the router. Typically I get around 7 or 8mbps.
Here’s the latest in my search for The Truth. This comes from a supervisor at Charter, Jason, who sounds more knowledgeable than most.
He says that the WCG200 should be capable of faster speeds than I am getting, but perhaps only if the firmware is upgraded. Can it be upgraded? I don’t know. If I had rented a cable modem thru Charter, they would upgrade it free, but I didn’t, so I may be SOL since the Linksys site suggests only the ISP can upgrade it, not the user.
Jason did say that he didn’t think my wireless setup was the bottleneck. His estimate of G overhead was less than 10% and said I should be able to get a 40Mb thruput or more in a 54Mb system with enough signal strength and no interference.
He also said they are planning on rolling out a 150Mb/25Mb service in about a year for consumer accounts, although declined to suggest a price. At last – the USA will catch up to such backward countries as Japan, South Korea and Finland.
They recommend a Motorola SPG900 cable gateway and said it can go to at least 40Mb in both directions. I see that priced at just under $100 and might try that route.
Some more tests. I switched from a wireless to a wired 100Mb Ethernet connection for my fastest computer. I still can’t get anything peer-to-peer faster than 10Mb, but that might be due to the slower computer at the other end.
But I was able to connect to the Internet at speeds of up to 15.5Mb/sec download! (The upload speed never went above 1.7Mb.)
So the WCG200 is capable of speeds measurably above 10. (And the Linksys chat line tech was wrong.) I’ll chalk up the difference between the actual and the theoretical speeds to overhead and perhaps bumping up against the limits of the not-so-state-of-the-art equipment.
And it does seem like the Wireless G, at least in this particular model, is not as fast as wired, even at the low end of their speed ranges, although the Netgear card in the computer might be a greater factor than the router.
>. His estimate of G overhead was less than 10% and said I should be able to get a 40Mb thruput or more in a 54Mb system with enough signal strength and no interference.
No, thats incorrect. Youre looking at a max of 27mbps, under ideal conditions with good equipment.
>But I was able to connect to the Internet at speeds of up to 15.5Mb/sec download!
Yep, wireless overhead is just too much. A 100mbps ethernet wired connection can almost do 100 mbps.
Its incredible that they wont give you the firmware for this model. Granted, there may be liability there for them, but I would think a little social engineering in that direction would get you results. I bet if you asked in the cable modem section at dslreports.com someone might be able to email it to you.
As far as 15.5mbps goes, residential cable or dsl has no guarantee of service. It may be that you’ll get different results during different times of the day.
I had a WCG200. I was getting 20Mb on my 20Mb connection without a sweat.
But its router portion sucked (only 100Mbps and prone to crashing). So, I bought a dedicated router. Things were good. But I just had to go and see if a dedicated modem would help. Bought the SB5101 on Ebay, which was highly praised. Couldn’t do above 7. Tried going to the cable company and renting one from them again. This time a Toshiba TXC2600. It does about 10. When a torrent is open, I can barely browse the web.
So I’m going back to the WCG200. (Hopefully the 1 employee at RCN’s service center won’t be too annoyed.) But, thanks, thread, for warning me! I’m not gonna buy it on Ebay because of the firmware. I actually heard something about non-upgradeable firmware while Googling, but now I see what it means.
Yes, after scouring the Linksys web site, all I can come up with is a download page which advertises “driver and firmware updates,” but there are no firmware updates there.
I have no personal experience with DSL, and it’s not available in my neighborhood, but I would think a rate could be guaranteed, since it’s a dedicated connection. Not so with shared cable, but the Internet is so lightly used around here that speed tests vary not at all with the time of day.
What has been so discouraging has been the tech support from “official” people who obviously woudn’t know a bit from a byte if it bit them, but adamantly tell me my rate is, and I quote, “20 Megabytes,” “16Megabits,” “20 down, 5 up,” “20 down, 2 up,” “20Megabits, but you can only use 70% of that,” and “16Megabits now, 20 Megabytes when we upgrade later this year.” Each [sic] of these statements were offered during a single online technical help session with 5 agents sequentially, and each agent except the last (#6, supervisor) managed to disconnect me before supplying the answers I wanted. One put me on hold for 40 minutes by my stopwatch, just to find out what my upload speed was, and never came back.
>, but I would think a rate could be guaranteed, since it’s a dedicated connection.
No, if you want guaranteed rates then you need a business-level connection with an SLA agreement. You dont get an SLA with residential connections, you get a ‘best effort.’ This is why your IT dept pays 400 a month per T1 while you pay 50 dollars a month.
My T1s are guaranteed up to an edge router in the network, but your DSL and Cable modem certainly arent.