# Can my network be faster!



## Irish_PXzyan (Jul 3, 2013)

Well lads!

I just recently went from a crappy mobile broadband dongle thingy to a 100meg line that states fiber power.

They provided a Technicolor TC7200.U modem and at first it wasn't great at all
I was only getting around 35000 to 40000mbps off of my ISP speed test which was very odd!

After awhile messing with settings I changed the bandwidth to 40mhz instead of 20mhz and Wireless to be Greenfield Wireless n only. Once I changed this, my Belkin adapter changed from 72mbps speed to 150mbps and perfect signal strength which is great!
Now the speedtest shows 90000 to 94000 on average speeds 

But is it possible to get it even faster?
Would a 300-n adapter be worth bothering with?
and would getting a 5ghz dual band capable dongle make things faster yet again??

cheers lads!


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## Aquinus (Jul 3, 2013)

72Mbit and 150Mbit on the wireless only describes the max aggregate bandwidth. Your upstream bandwidth is, in fact, half of that. So when you're running at 150Mbit, you're really only going to get 75Mbit. If you really want to take full advantage of speeds like that, you're better off running a CAT-6 cable to the machine you're using. However a 300Mbit wireless adapter (assuming you're connected at 300Mbit all the time,) should give you that speed. You're still better off running Ethernet cabling though imho.

The bandwidth limitation you're getting is from your wireless not your internet afaict.


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## Irish_PXzyan (Jul 3, 2013)

Thanks for your reply!

This is interesting though, last night I was using my laptop and through wireless it stated 150mbps also, but then I connected it straight to the modem using an ethernet cable and it showed 100mbps. but the speed test showed it to be 70000mbps which is slower than being on wireless?

I can't make sense of this at all!

Is there a reason for this??


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## remixedcat (Jul 3, 2013)

Your eth cable is prolly not 1000base-t how many pairs are on your cables?

Get catenary 6 cables (LOL)


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## ne6togadno (Jul 3, 2013)

this is windows fail
notification bubble shows max supported speed of the connected devises. if your wifi is 300mbps capable when you connect it to 300mpbs router windows will report 300mbps connection. real speed however will be lower.
if you want to use as much as possible from your 100mbps you have to pick router capable to route trafick between internet port and wifi radio as faster as possible (so called WAN to LAN throughtput if you upload a lot also can check LAN to WAN)
check this for more info 
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-basics
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wire...-smallnetbuilders-wireless-faq-the-essentials
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-basics/30664-5-ways-to-fix-slow-80211n-speed
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-howto
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-howto/24435-wirelesslanperformanceimprovementntk


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## Irish_PXzyan (Jul 3, 2013)

Cheers for the responses lads!

Also thanks for the links ^^ I will check them out now and hopefully find more answers to calm my nerves!

Edit: btw, I have a netgear WNR2000 router laying around.. would this do a better job? I know nothing about these but.. I did get this router 3 years ago and it was very expensive at the time!


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## Bo$$ (Jul 3, 2013)

Irish_PXzyan said:


> I have a netgear WNR2000 router laying around.. would this do a better job? I know nothing about these but.. I did get this router 3 years ago and it was very expensive at the time!



Try it out i'm sure you'll see a boost, what router are you using now?


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## newtekie1 (Jul 3, 2013)

Aquinus said:


> 72Mbit and 150Mbit on the wireless only describes the max aggregate bandwidth. Your upstream bandwidth is, in fact, half of that. So when you're running at 150Mbit, you're really only going to get 75Mbit. If you really want to take full advantage of speeds like that, you're better off running a CAT-6 cable to the machine you're using. However a 300Mbit wireless adapter (assuming you're connected at 300Mbit all the time,) should give you that speed. You're still better off running Ethernet cabling though imho.
> 
> The bandwidth limitation you're getting is from your wireless not your internet afaict.



That isn't really true.  Wireless essentially works as a half-duplex connection.  So it is entirely possible to get full speed in one direction.  However, traffic can only flow in one direction at a time, the connection has to switch between sending and receiving very quickly.  The bandwidth isn't halved perfectly, if you are transferring a file in one direction you can get almost the full bandwidth, but if you are transferring two files in different directions the bandwidth for each transfer will be half.  All this assumed you are running an adapter with a single antenna, once you start adding multiple antennas and MIMO comes into play it gets a little more complicated.

But anyway, I'd test a few times with a cable(cat5e or Cat6 won't make a difference) and a few times with wireless.  If the tests with a cable aren't any faster than the tests with wireless then the speed limit is the internet connection and running a cable wouldn't help any.



Irish_PXzyan said:


> Thanks for your reply!
> 
> This is interesting though, last night I was using my laptop and through wireless it stated 150mbps also, but then I connected it straight to the modem using an ethernet cable and it showed 100mbps. but the speed test showed it to be 70000mbps which is slower than being on wireless?
> 
> ...



Do multiple tests, and try different test sites.  Speedtest.net is usually pretty stable with results.  There is a lot that can affect a speed test, including the test server being overloaded.



remixedcat said:


> Your eth cable is prolly not 1000base-t how many pairs are on your cables?
> 
> Get catenary 6 cables (LOL)



The cable doesn't need to be 1000base-t.  For his purpose, testing his internet speed, a 2-pair cable would work just fine, so would 4-pair Cat5e.  There isn't any need for Cat6.


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## ne6togadno (Jul 4, 2013)

Irish_PXzyan said:


> Cheers for the responses lads!
> 
> Also thanks for the links ^^ I will check them out now and hopefully find more answers to calm my nerves!
> 
> Edit: btw, I have a netgear WNR2000 router laying around.. would this do a better job? I know nothing about these but.. I did get this router 3 years ago and it was very expensive at the time!



http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wire...15-netgear-wnr2000-wireless-n-router-reviewed


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## remixedcat (Jul 4, 2013)

SmallNetBuilder said:
			
		

> • Unusually low WEP and WPA/TKIP downlink speed





Also if you would please tell us the hardware rev.

The following links will give you hardware specifics like the clock speed of the processor, the RAM, chipset, etc... 

Here's links to the router's specs:
http://wikidevi.com/wiki/Netgear_WNR2000v1
http://wikidevi.com/wiki/Netgear_WNR2000v2
http://wikidevi.com/wiki/Netgear_WNR2000v3
http://wikidevi.com/wiki/Netgear_WNR2000v4

Yes they made 4 revs of that thing... LOL.


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## Aquinus (Jul 4, 2013)

newtekie1 said:


> That isn't really true. Wireless essentially works as a half-duplex connection. So it is entirely possible to get full speed in one direction. However, traffic can only flow in one direction at a time, the connection has to switch between sending and receiving very quickly. The bandwidth isn't halved perfectly, if you are transferring a file in one direction you can get almost the full bandwidth, but if you are transferring two files in different directions the bandwidth for each transfer will be half. All this assumed you are running an adapter with a single antenna, once you start adding multiple antennas and MIMO comes into play it gets a little more complicated.
> 
> But anyway, I'd test a few times with a cable(cat5e or Cat6 won't make a difference) and a few times with wireless. If the tests with a cable aren't any faster than the tests with wireless then the speed limit is the internet connection and running a cable wouldn't help any.



If it's switching back and forth quickly at a constant frequency, then communication both ways is going to be half of what you have. Either way, I've done big transfers over 5Ghz and even sending data one direction I don't see more than 50% of what Windows says I have, at least with my adapter. So it's more like forced half-duplex where half of the time is spent listening, even if the other end isn't talking. I could be wrong, but it has always appeared to me to be half.


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## Irish_PXzyan (Jul 5, 2013)

@Bo$$: I'm using a Technicolor tc7200.

The revision is V4! WNR2000v4 ^^
Two days ago my tests would always range from 45000-54000 and yesterday it was 80000-84000! Such a big difference and it's noticable while downloading.

I doubt there is anything that I can do! I guess I just gotta suck it up! The internet is very fast and I'm happy with that!


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## Frick (Jul 5, 2013)

Are those speeds with cat5e/6 or wireless? I would connect the computer directly to the modem, and if you still get those kind of variances in speed I'd call the ISP. If you are paying for 100mb/s, you should get at least close to 100mb/s. And it's fiber, it's not like the weather affects it, it should be stable. There might be drops from time to time, but not often.

BTW, those numbers are in kb/s, not mb/s.


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## newtekie1 (Jul 5, 2013)

Aquinus said:


> If it's switching back and forth quickly at a constant frequency, then communication both ways is going to be half of what you have. Either way, I've done big transfers over 5Ghz and even sending data one direction I don't see more than 50% of what Windows says I have, at least with my adapter. So it's more like forced half-duplex where half of the time is spent listening, even if the other end isn't talking. I could be wrong, but it has always appeared to me to be half.



It doesn't switch at a constant frequency, it switches when needed.  And as I said, MIMO adds complexity.  It sounds like your setup is using MIMO(multiple antennas).  In that case, the bandwidth is divided between the antennas, basically bonding multiple connections.  So the file transfer can only use one of the connection.  So if you have a MIMO setup using two antennas, you can get a total transfer rate of say 300Mbps, but if you only have one transfer going you'll only get 150Mbps, but if you start a second transfer you'll get 150Mbps on that as well, for a total of 300Mbps.  If you have 3 antennas the speed is divided by 3 instead of two.


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