Horrible wifi speed--tried Dell drivers

I am running W7 on my m17x. I tested it with the broadcom drivers and with the dell 1510 drivers (per the guide here) and same speed issues with both.

I have a 20 down/2 up connection and my desktop that is connected via ethernet is blazingly fast. The m17x? Download speeds fluctuate between .5 Mbps (that is not a typo...POINT FIVE) and 2-3Mbps, and rarely it will kick back up to around 10-11 (I'm not sure if the actual card can handle a full 20 down).

I'm at my wits end and have contacted alienware who have no clue and try to pass the buck by saying its my router. Thing is, my laptop used to work fine when I first got it, unfortunately I can't think of what I've done since then that might have caused this.

Please help me...I cannot game!

 

maybe call DELL to get replacement at least by 1520. it works fine with stock driver.

 

Have byou tried the intel driver for your card?

 

What intel driver...link?

 

The Intel driver is for Intel WiFi cards only, not for the Dell Wireless (broadcom) cards. You can find it the support section of intel.com.

 

Does the link speed improve vastly if you get REALLY close to the router? When I say close, I mean literally inches away.

If it does, it could be something as simple as a disconnected/broken or loose antenna, either inside the machine or connected to the router. If it's still really poor, even up close.. it could be the transceiver on either side.. or interference. The absolute easiest way to determine where the fault is would be to get another wireless device -- another router or another computer/device with wireless built in. If other wireless devices have the same problem connecting to the router, it's (probably) the router. If your laptop behaves the same way connected to a different router (like at a friend's house), it's the laptop.

I've seen plenty of transceivers in wireless routers just outright fail, with the router's hardwired connectivity remaining unaffected. Some of the transceivers operate at some decently high temperatures, so if the device is in an enclosed area, or stacked on top of another device, sometimes the heat can cause premature failure. The wireless a/b/g card in my Inspiron 8600 ran really hot and, despite being well ventilated, ended up getting replaced because it died. Failure modes for wireless transceivers can range anywhere from simply not working at all anymore to degraded signal strength or intermittent connectivity. It's not necessarily all or nothing.

If you're close to the router and running in plain 802.11g mode, you should see a link speed of 54Mbps, regardless of the speed of your actual internet connection. 802.11b mode should yield 11Mbps, but you'd have to have an ancient wireless router.. and 802.11n mode should yield something in the 100-200+Mbps range, if not more. It looks like the card can do 802.11a as well, but it's very unlikely you have any of that type of equipment.

Severe interference is another possibility, particularly if you're attempting to use the wireless from inside a microwave oven, a nuclear reactor, the surface of the sun, or faraday cage.. but that's probably not the case. More realistically, stuff that operates in the same frequency band as your wifi (2.4GHz for g or 5GHz for a/n) like portable phones and such can cause issues. A giveaway for this would be, once again, a laptop that works just fine at a friend's house. Firsthand, I've seen draft-N wireless routers that completely hosed a large chunk of channels for anyone else trying to use wireless in the area. This usually presented as full signal strength, but resulted in a nearly complete inability to connect to the access point, though .. so I think this is something else.

This really doesn't sound like a driver problem to me.. but I could very well be wrong. For the sake of simplicity, maybe just start by bringing the laptop to a friend's house with wifi and seeing if it works correctly there. Once you have at least one known-working combination, it'll make the rest of the process of elimination a lot, lot simpler.

 

m00t, thanks for the really insightful post.

So here's where it gets weird...

My laptop is literally about a foot (maybe 1.5') away from the router. The only device in between them is the cable modem which sits next to the router.

I just did a speed test on my gf's laptop which is in the other room and she got 11 down, 2 up. The second hers finished I started the same thing on mine and got comparable speeds (although its still capping around 10 and my connection is 20).

So this appears to be sporadic in terms of when it occurs. Could a router be on the fritz and be sporadic like that?

Not sure if my little test narrows down the issue at all because I guess my laptop could have the sporadic issue rather than the router. The true test would be to wait till I have crappy speeds and then test her machine I guess.

 

Try disabling wireless lan network. only use wifi

 

Ok, so.. rereading your original post, it's now clear that you're speaking entirely in terms of internet connection speeds, not wireless.

That being said, are the wireless link speeds themselves ok? If there's a problem with the wireless, it's going to limit the maximum throughput.. but if it's functioning correctly, you shouldn't have any issues. Even a plain old 802.11g link is still fully capable of handling a 20Mbps internet connection.

What sort of results do you get from the machine that's hard-wired to the router? If it caps out at 10Mbps too, it's possible that that's the actual operating speed for the internet connection, even if you're "supposed to get" 20Mbps. Aside from that, it's also possible that the server that's hosting the speed test can't upload any faster, thereby limiting the reliable results to about 10Mbps.

A router with a 10Mbps WAN port wouldn't be able to transmit data any faster than that, so a 20Mbps internet connection would be capped at 10Mbps. Some of the routers out there just seem to have throughput issues in general, as well. A friend of mine needed to replace his D-Link WBR-1310, so we figured we'd replace it with a Linksys WRT54G. Our local chain department store had two different hardware revisions of the WRT54G, version 6.0 and version 8.0. We picked up version 8, figuring that newer was better, right? Not the case.. we couldn't even get 5Mbps across the wireless. We took it back, exchanged it for version 6, hooked it up and had no further issues. Could the version 8 problem have been solved by a firmware update? Maybe.. but we weren't about to wait and see.

You could have other potential problems, like saturated upstream, causing poor download rates. At work, I run into people who leave BitTorrent running with uncapped upload speeds, then they wonder why their internet connection's downstream is so poor. Little do they realize, it takes upstream bandwidth to acknowledge the downstream packets in a timely manner. If you saturate the upstream, the downstream suffers immensely. Certain applications (or functions of software) can cause some pretty major problems. DHT, a feature built into most BitTorrent clients can pretty reliably cause router lockups, crashes and reboots.. and some software like Ares, though I have no idea why, seems to cause very severe lag and throughput problems when it's running, period.

If you can't get 20Mbps downstream even when you're directly connected to your modem, it's time to call your ISP. I work for an ADSL provider and we have access to sync rates and such, so if you have ADSL, the sync rate could be a pretty good place to start. At the very least, the sync rate is a determination of the modem's operating speed, so if the modem is unable to obtain a sync rate better than say, 11Mbps.. that'd be the reason why you seem to be stuck around that rate. If you have cable, that's a whole other ball of wax, but I'm pretty sure cable modems can still report transmission rates.

Finally, a lot of ISPs advertise connection rates "up to xMbps", so it's possible that, despite what they said you'd get, you actually can't. Once again, the ISP should be able to make this determination for you. If you speak with them, be sure to ask very explicitly and double check that the modem is actually operating at the advertised speed. If it is, and you believe them, it could be something completely unsolvable like a bottleneck in the ISP's network infrastructure. In the end, the weakest link in the chain determines its overall strength.

 

I've had no probs with mine. My old man has a new router at his place and I've been able to connect at 135Mbs.

In Hong Kong airport, I had wi-fi internet speeds in excess of 8Mbs...