Tell me more ×
Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 1 down vote favorite

Occasionally I need to connect into work via VPN from my home. When I try to pull down a file (tens of MB) often the download will fail partway through when I use WiFi, but it rocks in with no problems when using a wired LAN connection into the WiFi router.

We have a pretty quiet WiFi spectrum around here; I cannot see any other APs using our channel.

There doesn't appear to be the same problem of interrupted downloads outside of the VPN.

Where do you think I should start in diagnosing what is going wrong?

share|improve this question

1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote

The quality of a wifi network is highly dependent on a wide range of factors. What you should start with is the packet loss you have over this connection I think. This is probably the problem. Wifi has two main problems, latency and loss of signal that wired networks usually do not have. If it's either latency (ping) or packet loss you could configure the VPN network to cope better with this by allowing higher ping before timeouts are returned or making sure if packets are recieved by sending confirmation(tcp does this udp not, therefore udp is faster but less reliable in this aspect.)

But my best advice is to use the wired lan.

share|improve this answer
I did a quick ping of 500 packets off the router, no dropped packets but some occaisional spikes in latency... usally 1ms, but every so often 100 or 200ms or so Ping statistics for 10.0.1.1: Packets: Sent = 500, Received = 500, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 210ms, Average = 5ms – Jeremy Taylor Oct 29 '12 at 23:45

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.