Wireless help needed - not achieving speeds

[pinballwzd]

Hello,

I am totally new to this forum and hope that I am not jumping into a shark tank by asking this question but any help would be appreciated.

I have a SMC D3GN Shaw Modem. I found that the wifi signal was very poor and thus I decided after much research to buy an ASUS rt-n56u. I have set it up as a router and disabled the wireless option on my shaw modem. ( not sure if I should have set it to access point only but I will get into this in a minute ).

I set up the wireless channel bandwidth to 40 MHz so as to achieve a higher transmission speed ( just ask me if you need any other setting information ).

My account with Shaw is the Boadband 50. It states that I should get close to 50 Mbps download speed and 3 Mbps upload speed. After several tests, I am getting 48 Mbps Download and 2.77 Upload.

As I am only accessing 2.4GHz freqency ( do not currently have any 5.8GHz capable devices.. ), should it not allow at least up 54 Mbps via wifi ?

I ran a speed test on my Google Nexus 7 tablet and it is only reading 24 Mbps down and 2.69 upload...

I tried setting up my Asus Router as an access point instead of a router to see if that had any affect on speeds and without changing any settings, it actually was a bit slower when set as an access point.. ( prob. a silly test without having the a lot of knowledge but it was worth trying )

Should I be expecting better download speeds through my wireless network while operating on the 2.4GHz frequency taking into account my current hardware setup ? or is there anything I should be doing differently to improve my speeds ?

Thank you so very much to any help you might be able to provide...

 

[devnull]

Your performance could hardly be better. Speed tests can be easily undermined by the performance of the networks between the client and the server.

You may be also be losing some performance to transmission overhead and packet loss, but you're receiving more than 90% of your contract rate. I doubt any ISP would consider that to be failure to provide contracted service. The only service I know of that performs better is FIOS, and usually it's the customers that have FIOS internet and TV. Verizon gives them a little extra bandwidth to prevent the TV service from taking bandwidth away from the internet clients.

The speed test from your tablet is not surprising at all either. Tablets tend to have lower performing wifi interfaces than PCs, partly because of the small size and partly because of the power design. The wifi interface of the tablet is designed to compromise performance in order to achieve smaller power consumption.

Wifi's speed "titles" are all only indicative of the possible speed in an ideal environment. An ideal environment has line of sight between AP and client, no surfaces that reflect radio signals, and no sources of radio frequency interference. An ideal environment tends to only occur in the laboratory where the radio is designed. Without knowing any more details about your wifi environment, I can say your wifi speeds are good. Also, it's quite likely that even though you've selected 40mhz operation, the Asus unit is not using a 40mhz channel because of other wifi in the area. Most retail wifi routers will automatically use 20mhz when other wifi is detected in the area, even though you've selected 40mhz.

The only other thing you could do is use a free program called inSSIDer to check and see what other wifi is operating around you. It's also available for Android, so you could use your tablet. It will let you see which channels other wifi networks around you are using. What you do with that is find the least occupied channel (the best to use are 1, 6, and 11) and set your wifi AP to that channel. All your clients will automatically use the channel that you set on your AP.

 

[pinballwzd]

Thank you so much for responding. The world of networks, wireless technologies and such can be a very overwhelming thing and I appreciate you providing some clarity to my situation.. I will do just that and post some results to see if any suggestions can be made to improvement on my channel selection..

I guess that the channel - auto - selection is not very useful in routers..

 

[pinballwzd]

I changed my channel after interpreting the data through inSSIDer and now I am getting 35.84 Mbps down and 3.08 Mps upload...


Looking Better ??

 

[aaronwt]

You should be able to easily hit your max internet speeds over WiFi with a pc. With both my rt56u boxes I've hit 150mb/s throughput speeds when my media bridges aren't also connected. With my FireHD tablet that can get 75mb/s speeds using speedster.net. But I am also using the custom firmware which does a much better job than the stock firmware.

Sent from my HTC Rezound using Tapatalk 2

 

[stevech]

Hello,
My account with Shaw is the Boadband 50. It states that I should get close to 50 Mbps download speed and 3 Mbps upload speed. After several tests, I am getting 48 Mbps Download and 2.77 Upload.

Your tests show that you're getting what Shaw is selling. Those speeds are as good as it gets.

As the WiFi signal strength (two-directions) reduces, and/or you have competition for air time among neighbors that do heavy video streaming (like HD 1080), if any do, you'll see times when the numbers decline.

So enjoy!

PS: May I inquire as to what Shaw is charging for 50/3 service? My TimeWarner Cable modem is seemingly overpriced at $45/mo (part of a bundle) for only 20/1. I'd like to formally press them and the City/County office that gives them the effective monopoly by granting easements for running cables. I once contacted the City office (I live in city limits) for this. And no one knew who/how TimeWarner gets/renews/keeps their authority to use the public street easements (underground utilities here). Amazing. Someone in the City has to sign these things off!

 

[canuckle]

FWIW, their posted rate is $75/mo for $50/3. I have the 100/5 service for $85 and 750 gig data monthly.

They have improved dramatically over the last few years, excellent/reliable service and exceptional tech support.

 

[devnull]

I changed my channel after interpreting the data through inSSIDer and now I am getting 35.84 Mbps down and 3.08 Mps upload...


Looking Better ??

Was this speedtest on the tablet?

 

[pinballwzd]

Was this speedtest on the tablet?

Yes, that was the test from my tablet...

 

[devnull]

Then you've probably got everything you're going to get.