Wireless transfer speeds.

[Rock Danger]

something that has bee bugging me for a while is the inconsistent yet steady speeds of transferring files from my laptop wireless to the desktop (wired) Recently it's been roughly 7MB/s but it used to average 15MB/s - 20MB/s give or take a few. 

 

I'm using a killer 1202 wireless card with an Asus RT-N66U router. I'm 12 foot from the router and downloading or speedtesting from the internet is almost as fast as the wired connection. I don't live in a congested wireless zone, I don't pick up the neighbours wireless and nothing else is on the channels I used when using Inssider or wifi analyser. 

 

So what gives? Is there some sort of tweak, or is wireless a law unto itself in these matters? I know the aluminium lid of my laptop doesn't do the antennae any favours, but it still seems low at around 7MB/s on average these days.

 

Any suggestions would be great, thanks,

 

R. 

[TheKDub]

Try updating wireless drivers?

 

Connect the laptop via ethernet then try transferring files (Be sure to disconnect from your wifi network) to see if it is a problem with your wifi.

[ionbasa]

something that has bee bugging me for a while is the inconsistent yet steady speeds of transferring files from my laptop wireless to the desktop (wired) Recently it's been roughly 7MB/s but it used to average 15MB/s - 20MB/s give or take a few. 

 

I'm using a killer 1202 wireless card with an Asus RT-N66U router. I'm 12 foot from the router and downloading or speedtesting from the internet is almost as fast as the wired connection. I don't live in a congested wireless zone, I don't pick up the neighbours wireless and nothing else is on the channels I used when using Inssider or wifi analyser. 

 

So what gives? Is there some sort of tweak, or is wireless a law unto itself in these matters? I know the aluminium lid of my laptop doesn't do the antennae any favours, but it still seems low at around 7MB/s on average these days.

 

Any suggestions would be great, thanks,

 

R. 

So you are reading/writing from a local hard drive? If so that is to be expected. If you have an SSD to test this out with, I bet your numbers would stay consistent.

[Rock Danger]

So you are reading/writing from a local hard drive? If so that is to be expected. If you have an SSD to test this out with, I bet your numbers would stay consistent.

 

I'm wrting to the desktop from the laptop  - the numbers are consistent as in they stay at a consistent rate. But why they adopt different speeds is beyond me as the environment isn't changing. I have an SSD on the way. I'm just not sure why it's more poor than usual these days at 7MB/s. as I said typically in the past it would average 15-20MB/s

 

I don't want to have to step up to AC gear as the router and card for that matter are decent N solutions. drivers / FW is all current - I just thought there might be some value in something that would help this out. The interweb results are sketchy at best on this matter.

[skywake]

Damn people and their bad advice on the forums. Getting an SSD won't change a thing. We're talking about 7MB/s vs 15MB/s here. Even the worst case scenarios for low performance laptop HDDs are ~30MB/s, SSDs typically do ~500MB/s. I doubt drive performance is the bottleneck here.

 

As for what will allow it to perform better well I don't know. Wireless isn't exactly easy to diagnose on forums especially when there are no obvious solutions. It could easily be something like a wireless controller or microwave buggering things up. Less so on 5Ghz than 2.4Ghz but it's still pretty variable. The only thing I can think of is to make sure you're actually connecting to the 5Ghz radio. Other than that? It could be anything from a dodgy piece of wireless hardware to a dying HDD somewhere.

[Rock Danger]

Damn people and their bad advice on the forums. Getting an SSD won't change a thing. We're talking about 7MB/s vs 15MB/s here. Even the worst case scenarios for low performance laptop HDDs are ~30MB/s, SSDs typically do ~500MB/s. I doubt drive performance is the bottleneck here.

 

As for what will allow it to perform better well I don't know. Wireless isn't exactly easy to diagnose on forums especially when there are no obvious solutions. It could easily be something like a wireless controller or microwave buggering things up. Less so on 5Ghz than 2.4Ghz but it's still pretty variable. The only thing I can think of is to make sure you're actually connecting to the 5Ghz radio. Other than that? It could be anything from a dodgy piece of wireless hardware to a dying HDD somewhere.

 

This isn't AFAIK an interference issue as I'm not sure were it could be coming from as all the usual suspects aren't close enough to affect the router. I'm not even sure what an average / good file transfer speed is over wireless, I'm pretty sure it's not 7MB/s I'd say 20-25 MB/s is best you'd get @12 foot from a router.

 

Since the environment isn't changing, I'm just a bit confused on what is. Like I said in my OP maybe wireless is just a law unto itself - I'd just like to know if there's anything other than the obvious I could try.

[skywake]

Well just to rule out everything but the wireless completely do this test. Download iperf, open a terminal and run it with iperf -s on your desktop and iperf -c *** -r (where *** is the IP of your desktop). If running that returns with something like 160Mbps (i.e. 20MB/s)? Well then you know it's something like a file transfer overhead or a dodgy HDD or something. If it returns with something more like 50Mbps (i.e. 7MB/s)? Then it is the wireless.

 

Isolate the problem and the worst thing that can happen is that you'll work out what it isn't