"Silvershadow68" <anon@hotmail.com> hath wroth:
>I was previously on VM 4mb broadband service, but was upgraded on monday to
>the 10mb service.
Who is VM? I'm in the USA and have never heard of them.
>I use a Hp pavillion wireless laptop (2months old), and have the motorola
>sb5100 modem & netgear wgr614 v6 tw router.
What's a "tw" router?
>After getting upgraded i ran various speed tests & downloading from the vm
>games sites, but was only getting around 500kb dl rate.(this was using my
>wireless conn)
Is that 500kbits/sec on 500KBytes/sec? If the latter, then you were
getting 4Mbits/sec which is about what you should have originally been
getting. Hint: Use all the same units, don't mix bits and bytes, and
thou shalt not abrev.
Also, if this was done using a wireless connection, you can get a very
rough idea of the thruput by simply taking the connection speed and
dividing by two. For example, if your 2 month old HP Pavillion laptop
connection manager says that you're connected at 24Mbits/sec, you
would be getting no more than 12Mbits/sec thruput via the wireless. If
you have a flakey wireless connection, this will limit your
benchmarking. I suggest you temporarily use a CAT5 ethernet cable to
benchmark the cable service and take the wireless out of the picture
for now.
>I was totally frustrated at this, as this is what i was getting on the 4mb
>service.
If nothing changed, it's highly likely that you did NOT successfully
get transfered to the faster 10Mbits/sec service. It's not unusual
for ISP's to upgrade the wrong account, or for such an upgrade to
require that the equipment be power cycled before the higher speeds
will work. In the case of a cable modem, the parameters have to be
loaded via DHCP, which seem to require such a power cycle. One of my
customer claimed that it took weeks to get the speed to increase. It
seems she was using the on/off button on top of the SB5100 and not
unplugging the cable modem. A power failure apparently finally solved
the problem.
>After spending 2hours 40min tonight onto tec supp in india, who
>were with respect Utterly useless, i felt i was no further forward, and was
>even told at one stage, that Vm Did not support my internally built wireless
>broadcom connection
>Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN i have on the laptop.
After 2 hours on the phone, I suspect that India should have been able
to query the CMTS and obtain connection and performance statistics.
Did you ask them to verify the account configuration? What manner of
benchmark test did they ask you to perform?
>They also told me i needed a modem upgrade
>(VM/telewest suppled this modem 6 weeks ago).
That's not unusual. In California, SBC/at&t are still supplying
Efficient 4100 DSL modems that have obsolete firmware and that require
an upgrade on installation.
<http://subscriber.communications.siemens.com/subscriber_networks/upg-firmware.shtml>
Granted, the problems it fixes only effect a small number of users,
but it's still rather sloppy of them to ship old firmware. I think
you'll find the problem epidemic in the fast moving networking
hardware business.
>After disc the router and going direct from the modem to the laptop via
>ethernet, I was getting around 1200kb dl rate, which what i was hoping for.
That's possibly 9.6Mbits/sec. Ok, problem solved. Or, is there
something else wrong?
>Is it the case that i would not get this with this router, using the
>wireless connection?
I think you're asking if the wireless will slow you down. The answer
is maybe. See the chart at:
<http://wireless.wikia.com/wiki/Wi-Fi#Performance_and_Speed>
These are the maximum thruput that you'll see with various wireless
connection types. In order to obtain over 10Mbits/sec thruput, you'll
need at least a 24Mbits/sec connection. Anything less and things will
go slower.
Actually, there are other things that will slow down wireless.
Interference and co-channel users cause your system to retransmit
packets, thus slowing things down. The heavy use of filters, ACL's,
and router rules can slow the router down. It's also possible that
the router itself may not be able to handle the load. The WGR614 has
not been benchmarked on the SmallNetBuilder site, but you can see by
the chart that there are a few commodity routers that will not go
faster than 10Mbits/sec:
<http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/chart,119/>
See the WAN to LAN thruput numbers. Methinks the RP614 (7Mbits/sec
max) might be similar, but I'm not sure.
>I also uninstalled the router + reinstalled but this did not help the speed
>issue
What speed issue? I thought that said that you were able to obtain
9.6Mbits/sec after following the instructions from India. Is there
something else wrong or did you forget to specify that the
9.6Mbits/sec was NOT while using a wireless connection? If so, you'll
need to test the wireless connection seperately from the broadband
connection. See my comments on using Iperf below.
Did you upgrade the firmware on the router?
http://kbserver.netgear.com/products/wgr614v6.asp
Did you upgrade the drivers, firmware, Windoze, and the kitchen sink
on your new HP Pavillion laptop?
You might find it useful to benchmark just the wireless part of your
network. Search this newsgroup for my previous rants on how to use
the Iperf program:
<http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/>
<http://groups.google.com/group/alt.internet.wireless/msg/654a9244f66d8ca6>
You'll need a 2nd computer connected via CAT5 cable to your Netgear
WGR614v6 router to do the test. The basic idea is to take the
broadband modem and router out of the picture, and only test the
wireless. If that's what I guess is slowing you down, it should be
obvious from the results.
--
Jeff Liebermann
jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
150 Felker St #D
http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060
http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
wireless download speed 
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