File sharing Over Wireless?

dpjmie

Hi guys,
I have 2 pcs, 1 for downloading & uploading connected with cat5e to Cisco 2425 router which i got from upc.
On the same network i have a pc with a wireless N card. When im transferring data from the wired to the wireless, the average speed i get is approx 1.6mbps and it takes about 14 mins to transfer a simple 700 meg file. Is this right or is there anythin i can do to speed it up?

Cheers in Advance
Dpjm

Voodu Child

Be careful not to mix up MB with Mb. That would make any discussion of the topic difficult. 1 MB = 8Mb

So you say you were getting 1.6MB/s (or about 13Mb/s). Thats not great but its around the expected speed of a real-world wireless g transfer. You never really see more than about 2 or 3 MB/s.

It doesnt matter that your wireless card is 802.11n because your router is wireless g only (according to google, correct me if im wrong).

dpjmie

many thanks for the quick reply, your right it is a g router, would the speed increase much if i got an n router instead... or would ya suggest just wiring it??

regards
Dpjm

bonzodog2

Wired would be quicker (but not nec than 11.N ??); I used to get transfer of 1GB file in about 2 mins on a wired net. Or you could use an external HDD to transfer stuff. Beware of dodgy USB sticks !

dpjmie

Ah i do have an ext hdd but i dont have the pc i use for downloading connected to a monitor, i use it with logmein instead so my pc stays clean and tidy

Ill look into buying some cat5e online later, or maybe go wit the idea of using my ext hdd to transfer!

Cheers
Dpjm

Voodu Child

dpjmie wrote: »

many thanks for the quick reply, your right it is a g router, would the speed increase much if i got an n router instead... or would ya suggest just wiring it??

regards
Dpjm

If you do it right it could be a few times faster. But you're never going to get massive speeds.

Make sure to research the various types of routers (dual-band, dual-radio, etc) if youre thinking of buying one.

Razzuh

bonzodog2 wrote: »

Wired would be quicker (but not nec than 11.N ??); I used to get transfer of 1GB file in about 2 mins on a wired net. Or you could use an external HDD to transfer stuff. Beware of dodgy USB sticks !

Wired would be quicker, no doubt about it. 802.11n disappointingly dosen't match up to even the lower speed 100Mbit/s ethernet. In reality, 11n will give you average throughput of 30-60Mbit/s if you're lucky. There is always huge variance in wireless speeds. As a rule of thumb, upgrading to wireless n will give you a 2x or maybe 3x speed boost compared to wireless g (at the same range; the claim that 11n will give better range is generally marketing bull).

With 100Mbit/s ethernet you should get consistent speed of 80-100Mbit/s.

If you want the best speed, use 1000Mbit/s ('Gigabit LAN') ethernet. Note that this means you need a router with Gbit LAN ports and Gbit ethernet adapters in both the computers involved. If the computers match up but not the router and you don't want to upgrade, you could try to get a cheap gbit switch or connect the PCs directly (ad-hoc network).

Overheal

Razzuh wrote: »

Wired would be quicker, no doubt about it. 802.11n disappointingly dosen't match up to even the lower speed 100Mbit/s ethernet.

Even though N is specified for 600Mbps? You'll also reach a stage where the medium isn't the bottleneck: sometimes even from a USB 2.0 drive (480Mbps specified throughput) or from 1 7200rpm drive to another 7200rpm drive on the same machine via SATA 6.0Gbps I can't expect to have an instant transfer of a 700MB file, because it will become limited by the read and write speed (among several other variables, like fragmentation and head seek times) of the drives. Over the weekend I performed a backup for a PC to an external and the transfer rate was anywhere from 1MB/s to 20. It's never a Constant.

techguy

If you don't want to buy any extra hardware just plug your laptop into the router with the download machine.

Disable wireless and copy files.. You should get around 12-14 Megabytes/sec as opposed to 103 with wireless.

Make sure to disable the wireless though as if you don't it will use wireless and remain slow.

Razzuh

Overheal wrote: »

Even though N is specified for 600Mbps? You'll also reach a stage where the medium isn't the bottleneck: sometimes even from a USB 2.0 drive (480Mbps specified throughput) or from 1 7200rpm drive to another 7200rpm drive on the same machine via SATA 6.0Gbps I can't expect to have an instant transfer of a 700MB file, because it will become limited by the read and write speed (among several other variables, like fragmentation and head seek times) of the drives. Over the weekend I performed a backup for a PC to an external and the transfer rate was anywhere from 1MB/s to 20. It's never a Constant.

You're right, it's always a case of 'the weakest link' in networking. The 600Mbps is a theoretical maximum of the standard. I'm not aware of any 11n router that comes anywhere close. Even the best struggle to achieve a maximum throughput of 100Mbps in tests; benchmarking sites like smallnetbuilder or cnet show what 11n means in reality. The 600 is based on 4x MIMO at 40MHz. Most devices don't have the hardware for this in them. Even some of the ones that do only claim a theoretical max of 450mbps and you get 100mbps if you're lucky 11n has a long way to go, it dose seem to be improving though.

Overheal

there doesnt seem to be much interest in taking it farther right now. you can already stream HD content from one device wirelessly to another at this stage. the only thing that would benefit is large file transfers. N is essentially all that we really require at this stage, even with only single IO or dual MIMO. Tri-band is still relatively uncommon but its out there in places. People are happy now that using N and G even that you can have multiple users doing heavy bandwidth things on the same network with relatively few pains. Though i did get to watch at my cousins last night when they tried to share a maximum 300kbps DSL between Xbox Live Netflix, Wii Netflix upstairs, 2 ventrilo clients and 2 starcraft clients, and a 3rd laptop and 4th desktop and possibly a 5th desktop all at the same time. Needless to say nobody was happy - but the router was not the problem. How that family is not on cable yet i do not know.