Dell Wireless 1500 and Draft-N - Page 7

Thanks for the firmware update notification. I upgraded from the previous firmware to 1035, and noticed zero performance increase.

Setup: Dell 1500N in my M1710, XBOX hard-wired to Netgear WNR834B router.

Transferring files to XBOX from M1710 = average of 3.5 Mbytes/second sitting right NEXT to the router. This is, curiously, at the 130Mbit setting in the router.

Same setup at 270Mbit = 2.5Mbytes/Second.

Just goes to show how unfinished this technology really is..

How are you measuring your transfer speed? What are you using to measure the transfer?
I just used the task manager, and %10 of 270mbps is 27mbps which is on par of what it should.
If you also use the task manager what percentage of the maximum listed do you see?

I just check my ACTUAL transfer rate using my FlashFXP program. It tells me how many MB/s I'm getting.

I not sure to the exact conversion from MegaByte's to Megabit's, but you said 3.5 MBps 3.5 * 8 = 28Mbps which what I'am getting also.

I have taken a screen shot of my transfer rate and attached to this post.
This time the transfer rate sustained 14% about 90%+ of the time.
270 * .14 = 37.8 Mbps

Right, and 37.8 mbps = poor performance. I expect double that at LEAST.

Not sure what is going on here, but have you ever noticed that every advertised network communication speed in Mbps and the actual transfer speed is ~ 10% of the advertised speed?

Like isp's like comcast, verizon, qwest etc.. will say 6000Mbps and actual transfer rates will max at about ~600Mbps or 1500Mbps advertised, actual is ~150Mbps?

I think this is what is going on here. I don't know the answer to this yet, but I will look it up.

So, 270Mbps *10% ~ 27Mbps.

Also I have been testing the connection with a distance of about ~50ft across the house through 3 walls.

so after researching, I find that they advertise 270Mbps and I'm reading ~30Mbps, so yes this transfer speed sucks!

So far the only review I can find online is the cnet review and they showed ~70Mbps which is with the corresponding netgear wireless adapter.

The only benefit as far as I can see is the range is better and I have not had it drop or slow down. I can count on it to work like it is.

Maybe soon in the future we see the advertised speed with FW update, or dell might sell a new adapter or new software. I not sure where the poor performance is streaming from.....

Happy wireless.....

Yep, currently it's a total con. I invested in the Netgear WNR834B and two Dell 1500-N cards and feel just a little (read: a lot) ripped off.

Such is the world we live in.

It just so happens that with wireless tech that it seem to take much longer to work out the bugs.
We should see much improvement in the first quarter of 2007.

The 10 to 1 ratio you refer to is the difference between bits per second and bytes per second. There are 8 bits to a byte plus some over head bits makes it about 10 to 1. As long as you know what the other person is referring to you won't get confused. The correct appreviation is MB for megabyte and Mb for megabit (KB and Kb, GB and Gb). I have about 5 Mb cable service which works out to about 500 KB per second.

http://www.oempcworld.com/support/MB_vs_Mbits.htm

My wireless connects at 54 Mb per second, which means about 5 MB transfers.

Remember dial up? Say you connect at 56k, but your downloads would say 5k, same thing. Hope that helps!

bit / 4 bits to a nibble / 2 nibbles to a byte or 8 bits to a byte

anandtech has some comparisons of various draft n routers. Based on their findings, one should expect around 5 megabytes of average throughput. http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2836&p=6 Do you have a lot of interference where u live? That might be causing the slow speeds.

Not any more than a normal suburb, I guess.

I have a m1210 with the 1500 draft n card and a wnr834b on order. So i'll report my findings when I get them. If I don't get at least 5 megabytes throughput, both are going back.

I have been adjusting all the settings and now have ~ 60Mbps transfer speed, while sitting right next to the router. If I move away about ~ 40 ft, I get about ~50Mbps. It goes down pretty linearly as I move away.

Still not 270Mbps, but faster than 54g connection.

I don't think any of these 100 megabit draft n routers will ever achieve 270mbps since the max real world limit of megabit ethernet is probably around 7 to 8 megabytes. So with the wifi overhead, I think 60 mbps is actually pretty good and considering I only get about 17/18 megabits max throughput with 802.11g (with encryption on), 60 megabits is a significant upgrade. To get anything faster than that, one would have to upgrade to a gigabit ethernet draft n router.

Ok, I got the 1500 n card and wnr834b router and I'm getting max throughput of about 28 mbps with 270mpbs selected.

What settings did u tweak to get 60mpbs? There doesn't seem to be much options on the router itself except for selecting 270 or 130.

There are a bunch of options on the 1500 n card. Would u mind sharing your settings in order to get 60mpbs?

Thanks

I will say it again... I own a WPNT834 Netgear rangemax router, with the matching WPNT511 PCMCIA card. I am currently using this card in my wife's desktop computer via a PCMCIA PCI controller card. With my E1705 connected to the WPNT834 via Cat5e cable, and her desktop logged in at the advertised 240Mbit speed, our data transfers from her PC to mine top out at 93% in the task manager for me. Since I am tapped in at 100Mbit speed, 93% of that is 93Mb/s. This is MY theoretical limit because of TCP/IP overhead and compression... I would love to have a way to test 2 machines with the same card in them (damn Dell and their XCard slot...) because I just know 93Mb/s is not the top end for that router/card combo...

Also, if your cable internet is operating only at 10% of your advertised speed, I would recommend getting a line tech out there to see whats up. My Comcast account is 6Mbit tier and I am getting all of that and then some out of it. Especially since they introduced Powerboost, I can sustain a 1.3MB/s internet download speed on a good server (read: Linux distros, etc...)

Anyway, I know this info doesnt help those with the DRAFT-N technology (I own a Rangemax WPNT854 now too, and it doesnt even compare to the Pre-N technology...) I just wanted to point out that it IS possible to use lots of that bandwidth efficiently, given the right technology...

Here's hoping that Dell cleans up the 1500 driver/firmware set... I will get the card too when it works properly...

i just got a NETGEAR RangeMax™ NEXT Wireless Router WNR854T and its not going too well


the wired connections run fine all my comps have gigabit.
The problem is the wireless. I played with all the settings and i get 2.5 megabytes/sec max and it fluctuates alot. Can anyone tell me what settings you guys are using. Ill post more info later i have to go to work now

I believe that the wnr854t uses the marvel 802.11n chipset. You need to get the wnr834b, which uses the broadcom 802.11n chipset which is in the dell 1500 card. After playing around with mine, I'm able to get 45-50 mbps with write operations and 35-40 mbps on read operations. This is from my laptop to another pc. 130 meg mode seems to be a lot more stable than 270 meg mode even though its slower. With 270 meg mode I can reach 60 mbps write speeds, but its very unstable so I'm staying at 130. Hopefully, the drivers will continue to improve along with the speed and stability. Curiously enough, i also have a linksys nslu2 nas device and I'm only able to get max 25-30 mbps throughput on that even though a wired connections gets me 50 mbps.