Fast upload, slow download on wireless bridge?

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I have a LAN between my house and my neighboor's; we're using patch uni-directional antennas to send the signal, with switches on each side hooked up to other computers. When we first set it all up, the data transfer speeds were great, so we hard-mounted the equipment.

However, as of late, the quality of the connection has deteriorated substantially on my download speed. My download speed is horrendous. For some reason, the upload speed remains the same.

Does anyone know what would cause this discrepancy? I can provide more information if necessary, but let me know what details would be useful.
 
Wireless Networking

thenextvinnie said:
I have a LAN between my house and my neighboor's; we're using patch uni-directional antennas to send the signal, with switches on each side hooked up to other computers. When we first set it all up, the data transfer speeds were great, so we hard-mounted the equipment.

However, as of late, the quality of the connection has deteriorated substantially on my download speed. My download speed is horrendous. For some reason, the upload speed remains the same.

Does anyone know what would cause this discrepancy? I can provide more information if necessary, but let me know what details would be useful.

Brave techs...

What are you using for WLAN and WWAN?
802.11b
802.11g
802.11n

Download TCP Optimizer and Advanced Windows Care both are freeware.

1. Run Advanced Windows Care on all PCs
2. Run TCP Optimizer to tweak your network even more.

There is a neat program it's not freeware but you can try it for 30 days.
www.passmark.com Wireless Mon let you see how your network in the wireless world is doing. Lot of good info and a nice animated radar scope for wireless connection and more technical stuff in a sniffer type tool.

3. Run Wireless Mon on all wireless PCs

There is a lot of tweaking you two brave techs can try out. You might have to place a wireless third bridge repeater somethere so you can make sure your connection between the two are at Excellent Strength, not Very Good. Make sure you use Windows XP Wireless Connection than your third party ulitity. To me this provides better integration when wireless is concern.

If you're using a wireless access point devices on a wired network you can get better performance and setting the wired PC connected from 4K (default for all versions of Windows OS NT - 2003 Server to 64K buffers to TX/RX. Use the Advanced Windows Care but make sure you don't use 2.x Beta.

Download speed can be increased by setting the Max connection from 6 to 60 but I would only do that on 1 PC that you use for downloading. More than one PC you can set it to 40 to 50.

If you really want to get more speed you could build your own LINUX router which is easy to do. What this would really increase downloading speed, but again really one PC would get a boost. IPCOP is Router Server OS. Use that on an old PC you're not using. Need two PCI NICs to get that to work right. 3Com or Realik (Dlink)

When I move 300MB file from one PC to another say from first floor to the second floor it only takes 30secs or less. 1GB file take 50 secs to 1min to transfer. I make images of all my PCs HD so in case some goes wrong that process takes only 6 mins for 7GB to transfer the HDD over the network and create a image PC1.TIB. Still not bad. There are numerious of network tweaks that can speed up both the Up/dwl speeds.
 
I have a couple of ideas.

Since this is shared, I think it is reasonable to suspect another computer might downloading files using P2P programs (and so on...). Make sure there's nothing on you or your neighbor's end that might be causing the issue. To rule out issues relating to other computers (worms/viruses, P2P programs etc...) try shutting off all the computers but your own. Is the download still slow?

If your wireless is blame, it could be due to interference. You're upload throughput will almost always be less than your download throughput (courtesy of your ISP). Channel interference reduces your total bandwidth, which decreases your total throughput. I think it would be possible that your connection has degraded enough due to channel interference that the wireless has become the bottleneck for your download throughput but not low enough to bottleneck your upload throughput. That's about the only way I can reason your wireless being to blame. To fix this, change your wireless channels.

1, 6 and 11 are the default channels used for most U.S 802.11x products. Your channels should be set as far apart from other wireless networks in your area. You can use a program like Netstumber (free, too!) to survey wireless networks and discover their channels. You can use this information to intelligently distance your wireless channel away from any interfering networks in the area.

Using 802.11b instead of g could also increase your performance if interference is to blame. Some routers also have some form of interference robustness to help work around this issue too... And if you have a Pre-n or n (I don't think anything is a true n yet...) router, they are known to cause plenty of interference. :) I'm not sure how they handle interference though, compared to b and g.
 
More info...

Here's the WAP I'm using on each side, while this site shows the patch antennas being used at each end. I don't rememer exactly which model the antenna is...

I'll look into the other suggestions you guys have provided and see what I can accomplish. Thanks!
 
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