extender or wireless card

[Clint Deiley]

So lately my internet seems to be running slow I can barely get over 2.6 mb/s on steam. I tried countless times to restart everything every week to hope to see a fix but I've not seen anything over 2.6 mb/s in about a couple of months I used to get a soiled 11.1 mb/s with out any crashes on my extender I used to be able to download a gigabyte in about 2 minutes but now takes about 30 minutes I've been wondering if I should end up getting a wireless card or keep the extender hard wired to my desktop and get a new Ethernet port that might not be bottle neck performance if that is what it could possibly. Is there possibly a setting that I have to change to make the extender run faster or is it a dying extender?

 

Extender: Amped wireless SR10000

Router: Asus RT-AC66U

Chipset: Intel Z97

 

desktop specs

intel 4790k 4.00GHz

RAM: 16GB

GPU: Nvidia 980ti

Storage:Samsung 850 evo 250GB boot drive, WD red 1TB

 

[Trikein]

What do you have the wireless settings set to on the RT-AC66U?  Also what settings do you have configured on the repeater? Need to know what isn't working now to give suggestions on what might work better.

 

Also, have you tried downloading directly from the Asus? Wired vs Wireless? Also, what kind of wireless strength are you getting off the extender?

[Razor512]

Usually for best Wireless performance (WiFi), a wireless bridge offers the best performance when you can't use Ethernet.

 

If you are getting slow performance, then I recommend first running a speed test when on a wired connection, if it is faster, then I recommend getting a device with a good WiFi adapter, and connecting directly to the router, then testing the speed again.

 

In some cases, the WiFi performance can go down if the current channel used has become extremely congested.

 

PS, you can have a strong signal but bad performance due to a lot of interference, in these cases, you will notice behavior such as a download initially starting high, and then quickly dropping.

 

Another issue can be poor WiFi drivers in either the router on extender.

 

Here is an example of the WNR3500l V2, if it has to make many the devs for the WiFI radio made it so that transfer rate drops when it has to do more than whatever arbitrary number of re-transmissions that they chose. At the time, upwards of 200 other access points spread across all of the channels, thus most interference avoidance mechanisms were rendered useless (this is why it is recommended for all routers to avoid overlapping channels).

 

performance became like this:

 

(in this situation, the speed ramps up and then quickly drops as the drivers freak out)

 

(in this case, this channel was one of the worst, due to the verizon router firmware not choosing non overlapping channels, thus anything in the overlap would experience a massive amount of destructive interference. This issue was limited to the WNR3500l V2 and the WiFi radio and drivers that it used, the WNR200, as well as the 3700 and the 3500 v1 did not have this issue.

 

Data transferred at the higher rates were bit perfect (no hash changes), but because of how the drivers handled interference and congestion, it caused massively low speeds.

 

Sadly since the company making these drivers no longer release the source code, others could not go in and tweak this behavior pertaining to how they decide to lower the PHY rate.

 

I have not used amped wireless extenders before so I am unsure how their devices deal with interference, but if they have behavior such as dropping the PHY rate when the rate of re-transmissions are beyond an arbitrary level, this it can lead to slow performance. If it is the bottleneck, then I recommend you try every other WiFi channel and see if any of them perform better.

[Clint Deiley]

So I tested being connected through the router and got 25mb/s though the router for my download speed and its the extender the speed was so much better then before but I had a coaxial cable running half why through my house to get the router to my office area so it was not around for long.

 

I forgot to mention that about 6 months early when the speed was starting to get worse was when my sister streamed Netflix off the extender on her laptop with about 7 other tabs open crashed and reset all the options and for a little the extender would not reboot about 2 hour later the extender finally became responsive did the extender get so messed up from that day that the speed was degraded.