Wifi speed?

Anyone recommend something that I can use to measure the actual speed
between a wifi device and a router? I know it always says 54Mb but I
need to know the real speed.

TIA


cheers,
Len

In article <(E-Mail Removed)>, Len Cuff
says...
> Anyone recommend something that I can use to measure the actual speed
> between a wifi device and a router? I know it always says 54Mb but I
> need to know the real speed.
>
Any bandwidth tester/network benchmarking software.

Another way is just to time how long it takes to transfer a 10MB file
and work it out from there.


--
Conor

I'm not prejudiced. I hate everyone equally.

"Len Cuff" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Anyone recommend something that I can use to measure the actual speed
> between a wifi device and a router? I know it always says 54Mb but I
> need to know the real speed.
>
> TIA
>
>
> cheers,
> Len

Transfer a large known size file, stopwatch and a bit of mafs

In article <(E-Mail Removed)>, Len Cuff
(E-Mail Removed) says...
> Anyone recommend something that I can use to measure the actual speed
> between a wifi device and a router? I know it always says 54Mb but I
> need to know the real speed.
>
Run perfmon and select bytes sent/sec and bytes received/sec for the
network interface.

Len Cuff wrote:
> Anyone recommend something that I can use to measure the actual speed
> between a wifi device and a router? I know it always says 54Mb but I
> need to know the real speed.

What makes you think your connection is not running at the speed your
connection says it is? If it's the speed of your downloads from the net
then you are not going to get anywhere near that - whatever download
speed you see will always be limited by the slowest link in the chain,
be it your link from your ISP or the available bandwidth of the server
you're connected to.

It's not actually going to be that easy to determine the actual speed
between your PC and your router tho' something like Netstumbler may
help. Not sure if it will show actual link speed tho' and I don't have a
copy handy to check, sorry. It will show you the signal level received
tho', which is a useful guide.

<http://www.stumbler.net/index.php?cat=4>

There is a download link on there as well, if you want to give it a try.

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"Len Cuff" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Anyone recommend something that I can use to measure the actual speed
> between a wifi device and a router? I know it always says 54Mb but I
> need to know the real speed.

It all depends on your definition of "real speed".

Wherever you are reading 54Mb from is probably an accurate link layer speed,
and will depend on (amongst other things) the noise margin between the WiFi
device and router. If you reduce that by (for example) moving the WiFi
device further away from the router you will most likely see it change.

Other things which you might mean by "real speed" can be measured, eg:

1. Rob Morley's suggestion of using perfmon will give you the current link
layer throughput. This speed will be no more than the current link layer
speed (for WiFi, it will typically be up to around half the current link
layer speed).
2. Conor's suggestion of a bandwidth tester will typically measure the
currently achievable TCP throughput between two endpoints (beware, some
fiddle the results in an attempt to compensate for overheads). This
speed will be less than (typically 90-95% of) #1.
3. Harry's suggestion of timing a file transfer is a way to measure the
currently achievable throughput for transferring files through whatever
protocol is used (and, importantly, nothing more). This speed will be no
more than #2.

Alex