How do I diagnose a wireless network?
Ok, I have a small office with about 10 machines, PC and Mac. They are all connected to a wireless Belkin 54g router. It is in mixed mode 802.11b and 802.11g and most if not all the clients are on 802.11g though some may be on 802.11b so mixed mode is needed.
The internet works acceptably but file sharing is unusable. From what I can gather, the real world max throughput of a 54g connection is just over 3MBytes per second. From my tests, the speed varies but doesn't seem to go above 250kBytes/s, which as I said is ok for the internet but not for LAN sharing.
How would I go about diagnosing where the bottleneck is in the network?
The internet works acceptably but file sharing is unusable. From what I can gather, the real world max throughput of a 54g connection is just over 3MBytes per second. From my tests, the speed varies but doesn't seem to go above 250kBytes/s, which as I said is ok for the internet but not for LAN sharing.
How would I go about diagnosing where the bottleneck is in the network?
Comments
Originally posted by charliehorse
Turn machines off. When the speed of a file transfer "jumps" you'll now that was the problem.
I'm pretty sure when no one is in the office, the file transfer is still slow but I'll check early on tomorrow before anyone gets in.
Or it could just be that the poor little router just can't keep up.
Yeah, it could be. I was kind of hoping it just had the wrong settings or something.
For example, is there any difference to using PPPoA or PPPoE? It's currently on PPPoA.
Do other people use a wireless 54g router in a small office environment or in a house and if so, what transfer rates do you get for AFP filesharing?
A test site says the Belkin router got around 13Mbps but it doesn't say on what filesharing protocol. I'm getting just 2Mbps with AFP. This looks like it's transferring at 802.11b speed (though the network utility reports 802.11g) as it's about 5 times slower than 802.11g. Maybe the mixed mode on the router is slowing it down.
At work, it took 5 minutes to copy a 45MB file and at my brother's house, the same file takes half an hour! That's actually slower than his internet download speed.
Is it to do with certain routers not handling AFP properly or something? We just use generic PC routers, not airport express. Both are Belkin. I tried ftp but it kept disconnecting.
The machines at work use airport cards and my brother has a Belkin USB adaptor on his machine. That may explain the extreme slowness at his house because the Belkin adaptor doesn't have official drivers but still, you'd think AFP wouldn't go slower than the internet.
From some quick googling, it seems it happens on Windows too:
http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/29970
Maybe a packet sniffer will tell me what's going on.