[olug] WRT (was: Tonight's meeting)

[Dan Linder]

Travis Owens wrote:
> This struck a chord with me, since my new Linksys WRT54G (V8) is
> having significant wireless speed issues. I understand there is
> potential loss of speed compared to wired connections, but we're
> sitting within 20 feet of the router, and our wired speeds are +10M/s
> easily... wireless is 3M/s at best...
>
> The preliminary research I've done so far, points to an upgrade to
> dd/open-wrt as helping, but saying it's never going to be the same...
>
> I'm not asking for the same, but good grief... paying for a 12M/s pipe
> and only getting 1/4 of it... I think not...
>
> Anyway, I figured to toss this out there and see if anyone has had
> similar experiences, or any suggestions to fix it.
>
> Thanks!
> Travis

I can't speak for the high-end business class WAP hardware (i.e. only an 
access point, not an access point + firewall + DHCP + DNS + router + NTP 
+ media server + ... *ahem*)...

Anyway, my point is that these small devices tend to use the lowest 
priced part, and since a faster CPU is more expensive, they put in just 
enough CPU to handle the encryption, but not enough to handle it at wire 
speeds.

When I did have access to a Cisco WAP (4-5 years ago) I remember that 
the transfer speeds with encryption were around the 7-8Mbit and the 
un-encrypted traffic seemed to be quite close to the 10-11Mbit.  I know 
for a fact that my inexpensive "Hawking Tech" router/WAP can't even push 
7Mbit through the wired port so I doubt the wireless is very fast if I 
were to measure it.

The dd/open-wrt might be an option, but what if you made a PC-based 
WAP/router/firewall with an older P2 and a wireless NIC?  That's my next 
step when I get free time to screw up..er, um, enhance my home network. 
:-)  A P2-500 would have quite a bit more horsepower than the small CPUs 
that are used in the off-the-shelf firewall/routers.

Dan "IANAEE" Linder

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