Force 802.11A/B/G from laptop

[da na]

I have an HP Pavilion DV4 laptop with a Broadcom 802.11A/B/G/draft-N wireless card, and it is horrendously, unusably slow on 802.11N (150-300kbps range). 

Is there a way to force it to only use 802.11G? I've tried to replace the wireless card with an Intel 3945ABG, but the HP laptop seems to have a BIOS whitelist and I'm not sure what cards are compatible other than the Broadcom I already have.

[Kilrah]

Usually you get settings in the device manager

 

 

[Eigenvektor]

Disable 802.11n on the router

 

Does it have the option to create a separate guest network with a different band?

[da na]

13 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Disable 802.11n on the router

 

Does it have the option to create a separate guest network with a different band?

Can't ask every coffee shop I go into to disable 802.11n on their router unfortunately, nor can I ask my campus to do that for their WAPs. 

[da na]

15 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Usually you get settings in the device manager

 

 

I've looked but my card does not seem to have an option to turn off 802.11n.

[Kilrah]

Maybe try the horrific thing of installing the manufacturer's driver, that might add them, or even worse their utility, that may have an option...

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 2/19/2024 at 2:53 PM, da na said:

Can't ask every coffee shop I go into to disable 802.11n on their router unfortunately, nor can I ask my campus to do that for their WAPs. 

Honestly, if the choice is 802.11g, I'd gamble a crappy mini USB adapter.  Especially in public places where you are competing with other clients and you will be dramatically slowing the whole network down.

[da na]

3 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Honestly, if the choice is 802.11g, I'd gamble a crappy mini USB adapter.  Especially in public places where you are competing with other clients and you will be dramatically slowing the whole network down.

I can pull 54mbps fine over 802.11g so speed isn't an issue with the internal card on 802.11G; small USB adapters tend to have horrible speeds due to smaller antennas and I'd rather not carry around a big one.

[Alex Atkin UK]

5 hours ago, da na said:

I can pull 54mbps fine over 802.11g so speed isn't an issue with the internal card on 802.11G; small USB adapters tend to have horrible speeds due to smaller antennas and I'd rather not carry around a big one.

They do, but I'd be surprised if they were worse than 802.11g.

The thing is WiFi has to switch speeds so everyone else will be getting slower speeds while you're using it as its spending longer in a slower speed state than if you were using WiFi 5.

 

If I were deploying public WiFi I would have disabled legacy support for this reason.

[da na]

50 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

They do, but I'd be surprised if they were worse than 802.11g.

The thing is WiFi has to switch speeds so everyone else will be getting slower speeds while you're using it as its spending longer in a slower speed state than if you were using WiFi 5.

 

If I were deploying public WiFi I would have disabled legacy support for this reason.

Oh so then it's not my campus APs' fault that I NEVER find them running at 802.11AC or N which they're capable of? 95% of the time when I join the network it's at 802.11g already on an N/AC capable card. Interesting...

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 hours ago, da na said:

Oh so then it's not my campus APs' fault that I NEVER find them running at 802.11AC or N which they're capable of? 95% of the time when I join the network it's at 802.11g already on an N/AC capable card. Interesting...

Its possible your campus never bothered to upgrade their APs, in which case fair enough, no drawback to using 802.11g if they don't support faster.

 

But for the sake of playing nice with other users and your own security (not sure all old g cards support WPA2 AES) I'd prefer to connect using newer standards where possible.

[da na]

1 minute ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Its possible your campus never bothered to upgrade their APs, in which case fair enough, no drawback to using 802.11g if they don't support faster.

We just bought a ludicrous number of brand-new Cisco Meraki APs to upgrade from 5yr old Aerohive... bit of a shame they're having to be limited

[Alex Atkin UK]

6 minutes ago, da na said:

We just bought a ludicrous number of brand-new Cisco Meraki APs to upgrade from 5yr old Aerohive... bit of a shame they're having to be limited

That's certainly odd, unless the layout is so utterly terrible that the signal is so weak clients end up falling right back to 802.11g.

 

Some people connecting at 802.11g wont force everyone else onto that, it just eats airtime (because its spending longer servicing slow clients) and cpu time having the AP constantly switching modes.