A better WiFi connection
Posted on August 10, 2004 @ 12:43 in Tech
I forgot where I first found this tip, but it's been instrumental in getting my dad online this weekend.
The Situation:
The phone line and hence the ADSL connection are located on the ground floor at the front of the house. My dad's computer is sitting on his desk on the second floor at the back of the house. Running cables would be a big job requiring plenty of drilling, so I set up a 802.11g (54 Mbps) wireless router next to the ADSL modem and plugged a corresponding 802.11g wireless network card into his computer.
As it turned out, the connection was rather flaky with the default settings of the router. Although the computer said that the signal strength of the router was about 65-70 percent, the actual strength of the established wireless link was hovering around 30-40 percent. The network card was constantly trying to get the transmission rate as high as possible, preferrably at 54 Mbps, but in the process it kept dropping and re-establishing the connection with the router. Obviously, this interfered with a normal use of the internet connection.
The Solution:
The trick is to go into the administration panel of your router and select a much slower transmission rate in order to stabilize the wireless connection between the router and the network card. I 'detuned' the transmission speed all the way from its "Auto" (meaning maximize) setting to 1 Mbps. The result was (and still is) a rock stable wireless connection.
The Explanation:
Maybe you're wondering now... why get a speedy 54 Mbps wireless router and set it to transmit even slower than a previous generation 11 Mbps 802.11b router?
One consideration is security. The 802.11g routers support the more secure WPA protocol, whereas 802.11b routers don't.
The other consideration is that if you have a setup like this, there is absolutely no need for a connection at the highest possible wireless transmission rate.
Most likely your ADSL (or cable) connection will be slower than 2 Mbps. My dad's ADSL is rated at 416/160 Kbps. Note the difference here between the M=Mega and the K=Kilo. The ADSL connection effectively limits the topspeed to 0.4 Mbps, or less than 1 percent of the maximum throughput of 54 Mbps wireless connection. Dialing down the transmission rate of the wireless router does not make any difference in how fast you surf the web, but it makes all the difference in how stable your wireless connection is.
If you have a faster 1 to 2 Mbps ADSL connection, try setting the transmission speed to 2 or 5.5 Mbps. Most likely that will secure a more stable connection while still being plenty fast enough to support your internet related traffic.
There is one caveat, namely if you have more than 1 wireless computer and you want to have them talk to each other fast(er). If that's the case, you will have to up the transmission rate of the router to establish a faster connection between the different local machines. The trick here is to find the optimal trade-off between a fast and a stable connection. Just experiment with the transmission rate settings :-)
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