Wireless AP performance

[bcrawfo2]

I’ve been struggling to improve my AP performance on my home RB532a. There isn’t much about AP mode on the MT…it all seems to be MT to MT.

I recently replaced my b/g card with a R52nM. I was hoping this would give me a some boost on my current MT until there was hopefully an affordable device with Gig interfaces. RB800 is a little too much $ for home use.
So…with my new card I was only getting about 6Mbps even when I had a good signal.
I futzed and futzed and today (just before writing this post) I happened to look at my laptop driver. I took a chance and disabled B (went from a/b/g)…leaving it G and N (the Windows 7 has N in a different section). See picture below.. This got me up to about 16Mbps. This isn’t too bad. I may be nearing the limits on my MT board. I often see CPU go into the 90%s. Normally I’m in the 5% range.

I don’t get why it was up to my client to determine the rate.
I understand I can dedicate another radio (if I had the slot) to lower rate clients (which I am willing to do if I upgrade HW)…but I couldn’t get the client to connect if I set the MT radio to 2 GHz only N. It was always unhappy about “does not support all basic rates”. I never could find info on what I needed to allow.

Before I take a leap and upgrade my hardware, I want to make sure I can milk ever last bit of what I got. Right now, I don’t actually think I’m getting an N connection, but instead a G connection.

Thanks for any thoughts and comments.

[robertfranz]

Your first stop should have been checking the mode.

Obviously, if you have broadband with dl speeds >11mbps, 802.11b will be the bottleneck by definition.

As to your client wireless - who knows?

There is a lot of rooms on the client side for all sorts of odd behavior.

My Senao, branded by Engenius, and using a Wildpackets driver for Atheros, and sometimes manipulated via MS Netmon, not surprisingly has to be smacked once in a while to get it into the correct posture.

Keep in mind that all nics are built with chipsets from very small hatful of manufacturers, and there is often no one correct driver, with functionality - intended or unintended - varying widely.