Wireless (not WiFi) internet question

[endaround]

My brother lives in a rural type area west of West Bend and his only true option for hi speed internet was through wireless. Now going through a standard wireless router caused the thing to disconnect constantly and I was getting speeds near 250Kb/s on his 3Mb/s line. I switched out the routers out (I had tried a cheap netgear as well as a decent Linksys) for a switch. This caused the speeds to pick up to about 2Mb/s, so basically what was expected. Now the switch does have a buffer in it so I was wondering if I'm seeing packet loss and the buffer is covering over that allowing for the connection. Anyone else have Bertram Wireless and experience something similar? The area antenna for his signal is directly behind by about 1/4 a mile so I was wondering if he was having problems because he was so close?

[bullox]

How much packet loss are we talking about? I'd prefer a sabrematrician-approved sample size of at least a few thousand packets.

 

What I'm getting at is that there is almost a tolerance for packet loss through wireless connections. Extreme packet loss is another thing. I'm assuming he of course has a direct line of sight, correct?

[endaround]

Not really sure if it is packet loss, but thats the only thign I can thing of that would cause me to constantly have to reset everything, And with the router in the basement and the computer on the second floor, its not too fun to do

[bullox]

What I would do is run a traceroute to say, google.com. Find the first hop after your in-house router. Ping that first hop with some semi-big packets. Unfortunately with Windows I don't know if it is possible to change the ping interval, so you may need to do it overnight to get a good sample size.

 

Check this image for a little tutorial:

 

http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/2936/pingitpc0.gif

 

Let me know if you need any help.

[endaround]

I tried doing a traceroute to google and every time it timed out. There isn't a firewall here, so not sure what the problem is

[bullox]

If that's the case, just go ahead and try pinging any old site on the web (google works again) with decent sized packets and check out what kind of loss you get.

[endaround]

After about 3441 packets I'm getting a packet loss of 5%

[bullox]

That isn't horribly bad. That is acceptable, but borderline. If you were up around 10%, that would be a problem.

[bullox]

One more thing - this may be off base, but if he is doing some file sharing on the internet line, it is possible that the router is getting overwhelmed with connections. Things like bittorrent, etc can overwhelm a router when the settings are left at the defaults. It's a good idea if he is file sharing to limit the amount of connections that the bittorrent client is using.

 

Just an idea.

 

If that isn't the case, I would call tech support for the provider and get a better answer.

 

Hope this helps.