Billion BiPAC 7800N - Low Wireless Speed

chev65 said:

Yes I'm aware that the actual transfer rate is about half that. Not to mention that the WiFi speeds on most built in NIC's are only good for 150Mbps max so you should see maybe 70Mbps. The USB dongles are good for 300Mbps but that won't help with these routers.

So you could do better with a different router but no idea why the N Only settings on your wireless are limited to 15Mbps but it usually has to do with the incorrect settings and changing to N only should have helped big time. Of course signal strength is the other factor, less signal strength means slower speeds.

That is why I'm "confused and antagonised".

Signal Strength shouldn't be an issue as the transfer speeds don't improve at point blank range.
Also in my experience Signal Quality is more important than Signal Strength.

I'm actually wondering if the wireless power output is too high (i.e. creating reflections which are causing errors and lowering the effective transfer speed).

chev65 said:

You might try using InSSIDer to determine the best channel to use. Posting the results here might also help me figure out what is wrong.
inSSIDer for Home – Discover The Wi-Fi Around You | MetaGeek

A decent N dongle plus one of the faster routers using the 802.11n Only settings plus channel bonding which shows as the 40Mhz setting should be pretty fast.

I've considered installing inssider.
One of our other friends uses his laptop at our house and he has it installed.
We didn't notice any clashes with other nearby wireless networks (and our signal strength was far higher than those networks).

Another thing I'm considering is seeing if the 2 wireless routers can transfer between each other at higher speeds.

tommyg562000 said:

Did the degradation in performance happen recently or has it always been this way? Any new electronics come into or near your home recently? Any new businesses or factories?

You have tried other known working wireless routers, correct? Have you tried other WiFi dongles on your other PCs?

I understand that this issue has nothing to do with your ISP, correct? You are getting your advertised speeds even with the current wireless performance degradation?

The performance is actually better here than at our previous house.
My friend's copy of inssider shows that we are pretty much alone here (i.e. only one or two other networks have shown up when we have run inssider).

We have tried a couple of different dongles.
I just tried another router recently.

We are connected to our ISP by cable (copper pair).
The PCs are connected via a 1 Gb/s switch.
My issue is the internal transfer speeds between the wireless router and other wireless devices inside our house.

chev65 said:

You might try using InSSIDer to determine the best channel to use. Posting the results here might also help me figure out what is wrong.
inSSIDer for Home – Discover The Wi-Fi Around You | MetaGeek

Sorry about the delay.
Here is an InSSIDer screenshot from my friend's laptop.

The green signal is our home network.
The red signal is my friend's tablet, which was alongside his laptop at the time.
I have no idea who the blue signal is (one of our neighbours?).

chev65 said:

Where it says privacy, I should be seeing something about WPA-2 and AES encryption, instead I see that TKIP encryption is enabled for your connection, you really should be using WPA-2 with AES encryption in order to achieve full wireless N speeds. TKIP is outdated and not capable of achieving full wireless N speeds.

That's weird (I thought that we were using WPA-2).
I would've thought that my friend (housemate) would have selected the strongest security available.

I'll get him to adjust our router and see if that improves things.
Thanks. :)

Would that also explain the slow 802.11g speeds?

Would swapping to the superior security protocol affect any 802.11g devices?

The media streaming box is 5 or 6 years old and there is no way to update any of the drivers in it (audio, video, network, wireless, etc.).
Also, it will only work with the 802.11g dongle supplied by the manufacturer.

It's not possible to update the firmware, as the version I have is too old to update to the latest version and the manufacturer doesn't have a "back catalogue" of updates (i.e. I can't update in steps).

chev65 said:

I'm also wondering why a tablet connection would show up as another access point "red line" instead it's showing up as an access point with a stronger connection than the one you are using?

The fact that this secondary access point with a strong signal is using the same channel as you isn't helping at all, I'm not sure why that access point is required but the channel it's using should be moved to channel 11 to move it out of the range of channels that you are using.

That is my other friend's work tablet (he is a visitor).
I knew that he had InSSIDer on his laptop and I got him to take the screenshot.

He uses the tablet as an access point for his laptop (when he is on the bus) because it has 4G (he works for Australia's largest Telecom company).
The tablet is almost never present in our house, so it isn't an issue (i.e. his absence/presence doesn't affect the performance of our wireless network).

The signal strength doesn't surprise me as the tablet was literally less than 60cm away from his laptop.
The Billion was about 4m - 5m away.

chev65 said:

The blue one is a neighbor correct.

It could have been someone lurking outside.

chev65 said:

As long as you are running in mixed mode "a,b,g,n" etc. with the router then you can't expect to see anything more than 54Mbps. Basically running in mixed modes kills the functionality of wireless N because the router needs to slow down in order to 'talk to' the slower G clients.

My issue has always been that using any 802.11n router to talk to any 802.11g device, we have never been able to achieve 802.11g speeds.

I've never expected to see 802.11n speeds with our current set up, but I'd like to see 802.11g speeds.
I'd love to see 54 Mb/s, that's 3x faster than what we get now.

Wireless 802.11n speeds are a "pipe dream".
The main use for the wireless network is sending data to the 802.11g media streaming box.

chev65 said:

Upgrading the wireless NIC's for the G clients and changing the router to use the 802.11n Only setting plus WPA-2 with AES encryption is about the only way to achieve true wireless n speeds.

The media streaming box can't be upgraded from 802.11g.

That said, since I have found a second 802.11n wireless router, shouldn't I be able to get both routers to talk to each other and use an Ethernet cable to connect the second router to the media streaming box?

Theoretically that would allow communications at 100 Mb/s (the second router only has 100 Mb switch ports), which is ~7x faster than what we see now.

Anyhow, I'll ask my housemate to change our security settings and see if that helps. :)

I've added another pair of wireless routers (in Bridge mode) to our setup.
That has doubled the data rate.

It's not high enough to (reliably) stream Blu-ray data, but everything else is fine.