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I got a Mercury ch7465lg modem, which is capable of n wifi. Currently I use it with n only and 40MHz. It cannot do 20/40 according to the admin site. The channels are okay.

I got a PC with tp link tl-wn781nd, which is a 150Mbps wifi card. I had driver issues (blue screen) with the windows installed driver, so I installed a driver manually from the chipset manufacturer: Atheros (AR9485). Now Windows 7 tells me that I have 65Mbps connection which is weird.

I got an asus t100ta-dk046h tablet, with 150Mbps built-in n wifi and Windows 8.1.

When I try to copy files from a samba server with cable I got 680Mbps download speeds from the PC. When I try the same with wifi, I got 44Mbps from the PC and 50Mbps from the tablet. If I try from both simultaneously I got about 40Mbps by both client machines. I tried the PC with Fedora as well, I got only 24Mbps. (I assume the speed highly depends on the drivers.)

Is this a normal n wifi speed or can I do something to increase it?

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2 Answers 2

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This is normal WIFI speed.

WIFI speed is, of-course, subject to a lot of variables, including noise in the 2.4 gig spectrum, distance from the router, aerial configuration, sensitivity of transmitters and receivers and number of aerials.

The quoted speeds for WIFI are also something of a con - you don't get them outside a lab setup.

There are things you can do to increase your performance, but they involve dropping lots of money and are possibly not worth it. (IE You would need to upgrade to hardware to see meaningful speed increases)

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  • Using WPA2 only instead of WPA+WPA2 increased the speed with 2-3Mbps. The speed does not seem to depend on distances, this modem has a great range. The nearby routers are on channel 1 and 11 while my modem is on channel 6, so there is no interference. The speed is still far from what I expected, and this is interesting, especially when I check the labels. When I buy a gigabit network adapter I got 3/4+Gbps speeds and Windows writes by connection details that it has gigabit speeds. By this wifi card on the label there is 150Mbps, but Windows writes only 65Mbps and the real speed is 44Mbps...
    – inf3rno
    Commented Feb 20, 2016 at 6:28
  • (Even though I ran a Wireless ISP), I'm not going to get into an argument with you about distance, but I would point out that there is ALWAYS interference, its just a matter of how much. Not all of this noise comes from other WIFI devices (microwaves, cosmic background radiation, sun, baby monitors, misbehaving phones - the list goes on). If you are getting a 65Mbps connect speed that says something about the background noise and sensitivity of the equipment. You also need to take into account the very large overheads incurred by wifi equipment - nominally 20% of available throughput.
    – davidgo
    Commented Feb 20, 2016 at 6:45
  • By my network card I can accept that the real speed is 68% of the max. I can live with that. But by this card the real speed is 68% of the 65Mbps and only 29% of the 150Mbps the company claimed as max speed. I don't think this is normal. I can even accept the 29%, since it is a cheap equipment, but I don't think that Windows should write 65Mbps instead of 150Mbps to the connection details, when the connection is n-wifi. I don't like that part, and I suspect that this card never had 150Mbps speed, not even in a labor benchmark. That is my opinion. I won't buy a TP Link product again.
    – inf3rno
    Commented Feb 20, 2016 at 7:21
  • I modified the modem settings, enabled the 5GHz and added n to it with 40MHz in mixed mode. Now I got 150Mbps on the PC. I read somewhere, that the 5GHz is important if you want extra speed from the 2.4GHz n wifi. I spent the whole night reading forums about this topic. I don't enjoy it. At least there are some results. The next thing will be to setup the tablet wifi card, because it still has 65Mbps.
    – inf3rno
    Commented Feb 20, 2016 at 8:06
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    @inf3rno - unless you actually run a real spectrum analyzer, you're probably using Wifi adapter/AP level tools, and those typically only look at other Wifi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac sources. Unfortunately, particularly on 2.4Ghz, there are a LOT of other sources of noise. Ubiquiti Airview is included in many of their products (most of which are under a hundred dollars) and does show that kind of noise.
    – Anti-weakpasswords
    Commented Feb 21, 2016 at 21:19
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Update: I see that you've managed to fix it. I also tried setting it to 5 Ghz. It did increase the speed by 20% when I was near the router, but it was even less than 2.4 Ghz in my room! I think I've read about this before; 5 Ghz increases the speed if you're near the router, but it does worse as you move away. So I had to set mine back to 2.4 Ghz. I thought my Wi-Fi card was old, but I had the same result on my MacBook Pro.

In general, the advertised speed is often—if not always—is the best case scenario, which is not practical at all. Even the more expensive ones can't reach this speed. The most important factor is your distance from the modem. The signal strength changes drastically as you move away, even if it doesn't seem noticeable to you. Take a look at Apple's AirPort Extreme; you move from one room to another and the speed drop by more than half.

Range

You also mentioned that your modem supports 802.11n. Again, the best possible speed for this specification is up to 450 Mbps which should be lower in reality. Here's another comparison:

Comparison

Keep in mind that we're talking about AirPort Extreme which is an expensive router. I couldn't find any information about your modem in English or its price.

But to give you an example, I have an AirPort Express; its maximum speed is 300 Mbps. I use my MacBook Pro in my room which is a few meters away from my router. When I'm in my room, my download speed (on Steam) is around 3-4 Mbps but when I'm near the router it's around 5-6 Mbps. Using Ethernet cable it's around 12 Mbps.

So in my opinion your speed is normal, assuming that you're not near your modem and there are a few walls in between. Although your speed seems pretty low.

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  • I tried out with my tablet, the speed does not depend that much on the distance in this case. I got almost the same values near the modem and in another room. I read that this 150Mbps is a hoax, since most of these cards can do only 40-50Mbps. I am not sure whether this is true, but I have the same experience with both my PC and tablet. The modem appears to be good quality, it supports ac wifi, but I rather buy network cable than an ac wifi card...
    – inf3rno
    Commented Feb 20, 2016 at 5:53
  • Yeah, I forgot to mention the same thing applies to your devices, they are usually not that good. 150 Mbps is too idealistic and is definitely not possible of normal tablets/devices. Ethernet cable is the best option in terms of speed of stability; I would use it if I could.
    – Ludwig
    Commented Feb 20, 2016 at 6:06

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