I have a Netgear DG834G ADSL modem/802.11g router at home. My notebook and media centre PC (both (K)ubuntu 10.04) both connect at a reported speed of 54 Mbit/s, yet copying files between the two gives an average transfer speed of around 9Mbps. I see the same speed whether I use scp, FTP or even just iperf.
I tried copying something from my wife's notebook (Windows 7) to the media center and to my notebook using scp, both of which give me an average speed of around 6 Mbit/s.
On all three machines the wireless is reporting a link speed of 54 Mbit/s most of the time, sometimes it drops to 48 Mbit/s. All three machines and the Netgear router are within 4 metres of each other with no walls between any of them.
Based on tops I've found on other sites while researching this, I have tried changing the channel used on the wireless router to 1 and 6 (default was 11) and it makes no difference. I even tried to force the router to use 802.11g only, which also makes no difference.
I understand that the throughput won't ever reach 54 Mbit/s, but surely it should be significantly more than what I'm currently able to achieve.
Am I missing something obvious?