packet loss; what's acceptable/normal

Hi,

I'm using a wireless connection (Atmel chipped Sitecom WL-011) on my Suse
8.2 laptop. Sometimes, though I'm close to the wireless router, this
connection is pretty bad and pinging (for example) www.home.nl results in
up to 30% packet loss. Is this normal?? Pinging from a wired pc hooked up
to the same router never shows any packet loss.

Thanks,
Marc


--
Registered Linux user #309329, http://counter.li.org
SuSE 8.2 Prof - 2.4.21 - KDE3.1.3
Dell Latitude C800, 384MB

David Efflandt wrote:

> On Sat, 30 Aug 2003, Marc Onrust <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>>
>> I'm using a wireless connection (Atmel chipped Sitecom WL-011) on my Suse
>> 8.2 laptop. Sometimes, though I'm close to the wireless router, this
>> connection is pretty bad and pinging (for example) www.home.nl results in
>> up to 30% packet loss. Is this normal?? Pinging from a wired pc hooked up
>> to the same router never shows any packet loss.
>
> I would not consider ANY packet loss to be normal. For example I am on
> SuSE 8.0 laptop with SMC wireless nic, to Linksys WAP11, to SuSE 7.3 eth1
> proxy_arp from its eth0, through switch to eth1 nic of SuSE 8.3 and out
> pppoe on its eth0.
>
> wireless-laptop WAP---Linux2----switch----Linux1-pppoe
>
> I am doing that is because I got flickering link LED and heavy packet loss
> (25-50%) and when my Linksys WAP11 v2.2 was wired to a Linksys EFSP42
> switch/printserver. So my problem was that the WAP11 ethernet port was
> incompatible with a switch from the same manufacturer. I discovered that
> when attempting to update WAP11 firmware from wired side. With the WAP
> running through a Linux box, I get NO packet loss.
>
> RX packets:58476 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
> TX packets:158707 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
> collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
> RX bytes:12363701 (11.7 Mb) TX bytes:8034371 (7.6 Mb)
>
> Pinging gateway at my ISP from wireless laptop:
>
> 10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% loss, time 9094ms
> rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 20.603/21.963/23.009/0.845 ms
>
> Although I do get a high invalid WEP crypt count from iwconfig:
>
> Link Quality:60 Signal level:107 Noise level:0
> Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:482 Rx invalid frag:0
> Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
>

Well, there may be my problem:
Link Quality:40 Signal level:35 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

I walked closer to the router only to find out that the signal level of 35
was really too low and was up to 100 when just a few feet away from it. I
consider moving it to another location, hoping this will improve connection
quality and decrease packet loss. Right now the router is in a closet,
behind a door and very close to a few power lines.



--
Registered Linux user #309329, http://counter.li.org
SuSE 8.2 Prof - 2.4.21 - KDE3.1.3
Dell Latitude C800, 384MB