bobpeers -> blog

I recently came across a free, open source wireless network scanner. It available from the MetaGeek website and is called inSSIDer.

It’s very simple to use, just select the wireless adapter and start scanning. The graph displays all the wireless networks with their signal strengths and shows both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

I ran the scan from my flat and found 52 access points, but fortunately mine was the only one running on the 5GHz band :-)

After my many problems with my wireless router I can now see that my connection has stabilised. Using speedtest.net I can see that my download and upload bandwidths are now about 50Mb/s all the time now.

I should point out that my Internet connection has always been 50Mb/s and that has never been a problem but these chars prove that my wirelss connection is now not the bottleneck it once was as I’m saturating my bandwidth even over a wireless connection.

Here the download chart.

and the upload chart.

A few months back I mentioned how I had just bought a Linksys WRT610N dual band router. From day one the wireless performance was very disappointing (it briefly seems OK after installing Intel PROset Wireless software but that didn’t last long) and I’ve tried everything to fix the problem.

My main symptoms were.

• Very low bandwidth that varied wildly. At most I could get maybe 8 Mb/s on my LAN, but this would vary right down to a few b/s. Sometimes downloads would start quite fast but suddenly throttle back to almost nothing and stay there.
• Long delays doing DNS lookups. The status bar in Firefox would say ‘Looking up www.google.com…’ for 5 seconds before anything happened. This did not happen when connected with a wire and changing DNS settings (from OpenDNS to my ISP made no difference). I found someone with the same issue but with no resolution.
• Strangely my connection was always very stable, it never dropped out or disconnected and the signal strength was always good or excellent.
• Even connecting to the routers admin page would often take 20-30 seconds to load.

To name but a few things I tried to fix the problem:

• Reinstalled the routers firmware.
• Turned off the 2.4 MHz channel and only used 5GHz with WPA2 encryption.
• Changed the advanced setting in the router, altered the Beacon Interval and Fragmentation Threshold as suggested on the Linksys forum.
• Tried to trace the problem using Wireshark but I could see nothing obviously wrong.
• Installed the Intel PROSet Wireless software to replace Windows Wireless Zero Configuration and changed the advanced adapter settings.

Not having another laptop with an N wireless card I just assumed that the router was at fault. Plus the fact that sometimes I can see up to 40 other wireless networks from my flat I also thought that interference could be a major factor (even though it wasn’t a problem with my old G router).

I gave up on the problem and just used a wired connection until last week when I noticed there was a new version of the Intel PROset to download (I was using driver 12.2.0.0 now it’s 12.4.0.0) so I installed that.

The difference is astounding to say the least. Using Filezilla to check FTP transfer speeds I’m now getting up to 81Mb/s in the same room as the router and about 60-70Mb/s in my lounge that’s 15 metres and 2 walls from the router.

On top of that the DNS issue has disappeared, so I can finally use my LAN as it was intended. I’ve often read how new firmware can fix a whole host of issues but I’ve never before experienced an improvement like this.

I ordered my new router last week and set it up over the weekend, it’s a Linksys WRT610N, shown here.

First thing is that it looks pretty good for a router, although it takes up more desk space due to the flat design. To avoid this you can attach it to a wall as there are screw holes in the base.

Set up was very easy even though there are lots of settings that are new to me, especially since it has 2 radios it actually has 2 SSIDs each with their own security settings. I didn’t use the included CD as it’s not very difficult to do it without.

I only have one laptop with a wireless adapter (Intel 5300 AGN) so I set the router to only use wireless N and set my laptop up to connect to the 5GHz N radio thereby hopefully reducing the interference with the 34 other networks I can see from my flat, most of which are on the 2.4GHz frequency.

Initial connection was fine but it didn’t take long to realise the connection speed was very bad, plus it would loose the connection on a regular basis. By very bad I mean down to 8 Kb/s! I then updated the firmware on the router as it was not the latest from then Linksys site.

This seemed to help a little but not totally, sometimes times I would get 50Mb/s plus then nothing. Finally I replaced the Windows Zero Configuration with the Intel PROset Wireless Software (I did try to get the software as recommended from the HP support site but the download was 89MB compared to 24 MB from Intel and had an older version of the wireless card driver included for some reason).

This seems to have done the trick at least so far. The connection has not dropped since and the bandwidth seems consistently higher. At least using the Speedtest.net site I can confirm that I’m consistently saturating my internet connection at 50Mb/s.

On another note the Intel software is much more informative than the Windows software as it actually tells you which wireless specification each SSID is transmitting at.

I’ll carry out some more tests on my LAN soon to see what bandwidth I’m actually getting with the new router. One final bonus is that wired connections to my NAS are also considerably faster now that the router had Gigabit Ethernet support.

I’m thinking about soon buying a Dual band Wireless N router, probably the Linksys WRT610N as I’ve read some very good reviews regarding it’s bandwidth especially at longer ranges.

The main reason is that my work laptop has the Intel(R) WiFi Link 5300 AGN wireless card so I’d like to be able to use the extra bandwidth, plus the router has Gigabit Ethernet so even wired transfers to my Synology NAS box will benefit (it has a Gigabit network card). The only thing missing is Jumbo Frame support but I can live without that.

I also considered the D-Link Wireless N Duo Media Router DIR-855 but it’s about 250 DKK more expensive than the Linksys.

A friend bought a new laptop on my recommendation but now needs it setting up with a wireless connection. She lives in a small flat, has very basic computing needs and only has the one computer currently connected to her cable modem.

I advised her just to get a cheap 802.11g router since these days even a cheap basic model is more than adequate for her needs and they can be picked up for 200-300 DKK (about $40-$60) . Her laptop has the Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945ABG module built in like many laptops these days.

When I came to visit and set up the network I saw she had a Wireless G+ MIMO Modem Router and after talking to her a few thoughts sprang to mind:

1. This router has a built in ADSL modem but she has internet through a cable modem so can’t even replace the cable modem with this box, instead she will have to use both. Then why sell her a router with useless ADSL modem built in?
2. Part of the sales pitch was of course speed, how this is G+ and runs at 108 Mbps compared to the standard 54 Mbps. Two problems here, looking at the product page it’s clear that to achive this she’ll have to use a compatible card for her laptop. Since she doesn’t want to buy more hardware this speed is just not true.
   The other problem is that since she doesn’t have an internal network but just connects directly to the internet it doesn’t really matter how fast the wireless works just as long as it’s faster than her internet connection!
   So many people don’t get this, but it even if the wireless works at a quadrillion Mbps it will only be that fast from her laptop to the router, after that it will run at 2 Mbps, the speed of her internet connection.
3. Another selling point was range, the idea that MIMO suffers less from interference and has a greater range that standard 802.11g products. Bearing in mind that she will usually be sitting less that 10 metres from her router this seems a bit pointless.

At the end of the day it’s easy to upsell computer equipment to the general public since the whole field is full of cryptic codes and changes every 10 minutes it seems.
But that’s why you need people you can trust to sell you the right thing rather than just think about the companies bottom line while, unfortunalty this service is all to rare these days.

I bought my current laptop, an Acer Travelmate 800, in June 2003. Yes it’s an antique by todays standards but it was one of the first with built in wireless connectivity.

It’s the original Intel Centrino platform with the Intel PRO Wireless 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter (802.11b). At the same time I bought a Linksys Wireless Router and at the time this was the only wireless signal I could see from my flat. Needless to say I got no interference and although 802.11b maxed out at about 2 Mbits/s in the real world I always had a steady, stable connection.

Now it’s almost 5 years later and at any given time I see between 5 and 15 wireless routers broadcasting their SSIDs plus god knows how many others not broadcasting the SSID.

Even though I’ve since bought a new Netgear router these signals make my wireless connection almost useless. If I can connect at all the signal drops out about every 5 minutes and then reconnects, if I’m lucky. Other times it just drops the connection and stays disconnected until I manually intervene to force a reconnection.

After reading this column by Pc Pros John Honeyball I agree completely. Compared to my wired LAN, WLAN is a joke, the really annoying part is that I so much want it to work well.

I’m planning on upgrading to a new laptop this year, one with the wireless 802.11n standard (maybe out of Draft status by then) and I’m hoping that the interference issue has been somewhat improved with the advent of MIMO technology

My internet connection runs at about 10Mbits/s but I also have a NAS storage device that I use for backups and general storage so I would ideally like that my wireless connection will run at least as fast as my wired connection, at least 40-50 Mbits/s. From what I’ve read 802.11n can achieve this but having been disappointed in the past I’ll wait and see.

At the same time I’ll upgrade my router so all my network devices will also be using Gigabit Ethernet (bar my printer) so at least my wired network will be up to speed.