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cliche · 09-22-2004, 03:02 PM

A curious one this. I'd love it if someone understands and can help!

I've set up a wireless LAN (Belkin 54g router) round the accommodation of our hospital to provide a shared 1.5Mb cable connection for the residents. It's working fine. Except for one computer (Desktop, Win2000, USR 22Mbps 802.11 pci card), which consistently has slow (but working) access.

Computers in the same room (and further) can easily get full speed, but this computer seems limited to about 100kbit/s for its wifi connection. I briefly tried moving it next to the router (well, within a foot) but it made no difference.

Strangely, experimentation with ping -l 40000 (sending extremely large ping packets to test throughput) to the router shows that when the network connection first starts up, it runs at full speed. I can use outlook express on the computer to download emails etc from the internet, and the connection remains at full speed. However, when loading Internet Explorer approximately the first two or three connections (nb connections not pages/clicks) will load at full speed and then the wifi connection seems to 'switch down' to a remarkably constant 100kbits. This instantly results in a massive increase in ping times to the router as observed by leaving a command window running with ping -t -l 40000.

The speed will instantly return to full on disabling and re-enabling the pci device - but slows back down after the next few IE connections.

I'm not sure it's IE doing this, rather than something to do with bandwidth use - but I've managed to suck a fair bit of width (up to 500kbits) with massive pinging sessions without slowing the connection down. I'm going to have a look for other ways to cause the slowdown later - eg ftp or another web browser.

But, in the meantime, any ideas?

09-22-2004, 03:02 PM	#1 (permalink)
cliche Rookie Location: Oxford, UK	Internet Explorer slows wifi?? A curious one this. I'd love it if someone understands and can help! I've set up a wireless LAN (Belkin 54g router) round the accommodation of our hospital to provide a shared 1.5Mb cable connection for the residents. It's working fine. Except for one computer (Desktop, Win2000, USR 22Mbps 802.11 pci card), which consistently has slow (but working) access. Computers in the same room (and further) can easily get full speed, but this computer seems limited to about 100kbit/s for its wifi connection. I briefly tried moving it next to the router (well, within a foot) but it made no difference. Strangely, experimentation with ping -l 40000 (sending extremely large ping packets to test throughput) to the router shows that when the network connection first starts up, it runs at full speed. I can use outlook express on the computer to download emails etc from the internet, and the connection remains at full speed. However, when loading Internet Explorer approximately the first two or three connections (nb connections not pages/clicks) will load at full speed and then the wifi connection seems to 'switch down' to a remarkably constant 100kbits. This instantly results in a massive increase in ping times to the router as observed by leaving a command window running with ping -t -l 40000. The speed will instantly return to full on disabling and re-enabling the pci device - but slows back down after the next few IE connections. I'm not sure it's IE doing this, rather than something to do with bandwidth use - but I've managed to suck a fair bit of width (up to 500kbits) with massive pinging sessions without slowing the connection down. I'm going to have a look for other ways to cause the slowdown later - eg ftp or another web browser. But, in the meantime, any ideas? __________________ I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. -- John Cage (1912 - 1992)