How to speed up network transfer speed

[Yongtjunkit]

Hi, I was wondering if I can get faster network transfer speed over wifi to my gigabit nas while being able to use the Internet normally. The device only surports 2.4ghz wifi. 

[SaladFingers]

You are limited by the wi-fi interface. That includes the bandwidth limits of the device you're connecting with (your laptop for example) and the device you're connecting to (router/access point). For example, older laptops can only do like 54mbit with their wireless cards. That's around 6-6.5 megabytes/second and will be the limit no matter what.

 

"Gigabit" speeds are irrelevant if your speed is bottle-necked by your wireless bandwidth. My advice is to try and use an ethernet cable. With a cable, on gigabit, you should be able to get anywhere around 60-120mb/s depending on your storage media speeds.

[Yongtjunkit]

1 minute ago, SaladFingers said:

You are limited by the wi-fi interface. That includes the bandwidth limits of the device you're connecting with (your laptop for example), the device you're connecting to (router/access point). For example, older laptops can only do like 54mbit with their wireless cards. That's around 6-6.5 megabytes/second and will be the limit no matter what.

 

"Gigabit" speeds are irrelevant if your speed is bottle-necked by your wireless bandwidth. My advice is to try and use an ethernet cable. With a cable, on gigabit, you should be able to get anywhere around 60-120mb/s depending on your storage media speeds.

It's wireless n and will power line help? As for now as a temporary solution is there anyway to separate the load by having one wifi adapter(usb wireless n) to do file transfer while the internal wifi adapter for Internet connection?

[SaladFingers]

22 minutes ago, Yongtjunkit said:

It's wireless n and will power line help? As for now as a temporary solution is there anyway to separate the load by having one wifi adapter(usb wireless n) to do file transfer while the internal wifi adapter for Internet connection?

Power line won't really help as your data still have to go through wireless. It will help if your signal is bad though (for example used together with an access point).

 

You probably can use two separate adapters at the same time, but I'm not completely sure how you'd go about doing it. You could try creating 2 separate networks. Or simply "brick" one of your adapters so it can't connect to the internet but still to the network (like forcing a bad IP / subnet mask). But then I'm not sure how you could force local file transfers to only use one NIC. Maybe there is some ICS voodoo that can be done if you put another computer between the router and the rest of the network. I'll let someone more knowledgeable chime in for this.

[Yongtjunkit]

6 minutes ago, SaladFingers said:

Power line won't really help as your data still have to go through wireless. It will help if your signal is bad though (for example used together with an access point).

 

You probably can use two separate adapters at the same time, but I'm not completely sure how you'd go about doing it. You could try creating 2 separate networks. Or simply "brick" one of your adapters so it can't connect to the internet but still to the network (like forcing a bad IP / subnet mask). But then I'm not sure how you could force local file transfers to only use one NIC. Maybe there is some ICS voodoo that can be done if you put another computer between the router and the rest of the network. I'll let someone more knowledgeable chime in for this.

I thought that powerline that advertise like 1000+ mbps would help me getting better transfer speed like an ncix video that linus did last time 

[SaladFingers]

4 minutes ago, Yongtjunkit said:

I thought that powerline that advertise like 1000+ mbps would help me getting better transfer speed like an ncix video that linus did last time 

You have to understand bottlenecks though. Let's say your connection is like this:

 

Laptop -> Access Point -> Power Line -> Router

 

The final speed from point A (laptop) to point B (router) will be determined by the slowest point in the chain. If your laptop can only do, say 150mb/s with the access point, then it doesn't matter how fast the power line or your Ethernet protocol is.

 

One thing you could try is find out your adapter's limits and get a router than can do double that via wireless. Then connect with both adapters to the same network and bridge the connections. I'm still not sure how this will work in the details as I haven't tried it myself.

 

As a personal advice, though: Don't invest on wi-fi for file transfers or other data intensive stuff. It's unreliable and much of the time there's nothing you can do about it (neighbor's new router too strong, others switching channels randomly and interfering when you thought you had it all work perfectly, etc), has lower bandwidth, higher latency, occasional disconnects, etc etc.

[Yongtjunkit]

10 minutes ago, SaladFingers said:

You have to understand bottlenecks though. Let's say your connection is like this:

 

Laptop -> Access Point -> Power Line -> Router

 

The final speed from point A (laptop) to point B (router) will be determined by the slowest point in the chain. If your laptop can only do, say 150mb/s with the access point, then it doesn't matter how fast the power line or your Ethernet protocol is.

 

One thing you could try is find out your adapter's limits and get a router than can do double that via wireless. Then connect with both adapters to the same network and bridge the connections. I'm still not sure how this will work in the details as I haven't tried it myself.

 

As a personal advice, though: Don't invest on wi-fi for file transfers or other data intensive stuff. It's unreliable and much of the time there's nothing you can do about it (neighbor's new router too strong, others switching channels randomly and interfering when you thought you had it all work perfectly, etc), has lower bandwidth, higher latency, occasional disconnects, etc etc.

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/1928784988 

 

Internet speed subscribed : 10mbps up and down 

 

Here's a screenshot of the wifi network in my area and where I would use my laptop 

[SaladFingers]

All I can tell you from the above is that your internet alone will need/use around 1-1.5 megabytes/second. If your wifi is connected at 150mbit speed,  then your overall speed would be around 17-19 megabytes/second. If you want to transfer a file and use the internet at the same time, that is the bandwidth available to you. If you could bridge 2 of those wireless connections into one, it would double to around 35-40mb/s. Still far less than what a cable would let you do on a gigabit network which is around 100-120mb/s.

 

Like I said, you are limited by the wi-fi protocol, there is no way around it. Your internet will not take much of that bandwidth so it should work at 100%, but if you do file transfers at the same time you reach bottlenecks.

[Yongtjunkit]

20 minutes ago, SaladFingers said:

All I can tell you from the above is that your internet alone will need/use around 1-1.5 megabytes/second. If your wifi is connected at 150mbit speed,  then your overall speed would be around 17-19 megabytes/second. If you want to transfer a file and use the internet at the same time, that is the bandwidth available to you. If you could bridge 2 of those wireless connections into one, it would double to around 35-40mb/s. Still far less than what a cable would let you do on a gigabit network which is around 100-120mb/s.

 

Like I said, you are limited by the wi-fi protocol, there is no way around it. Your internet will not take much of that bandwidth so it should work at 100%, but if you do file transfers at the same time you reach bottlenecks.

I do see when I go into the connection properties, I do see the link speed of 70+mbps and that's like the other end and 1 floor up of the house(laptop built in wifi) but when I plug in an 300 mbps tplink usb wifi adapter I get more than 130+ mbps

[SaladFingers]

3 minutes ago, Yongtjunkit said:

I do see when I go into the connection properties, I do see the link speed of 70+mbps and that's like the other end and 1 floor up of the house(laptop built in wifi) but when I plug in an 300 mbps tplink usb wifi adapter I get more than 130+ mbps

Well, what you see is what you get. 130mbit equals exactly to 16.25MB/s so that's the absolute highest speed you can reach from between that machine and the network.

 

But going back to what I said about being limited by the lowest in the chain - if you want to send/receive a file with that other machine that only does 70mbit, then that's what the highest will be, around 8MB/s.