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I have router Netgear DGN3500 and I recently bought a D-Link DWA-123 N150 dongle to get faster file transfers from my laptop running Windows 7 32bit to my PC running Windows 10. My PC is wired to the router and the laptop is like 6 meters away from the router.

I checked posts here with similar problems and found that when I change the channel on my router from 11 to 1 my speed improves from 52mbps to 120mbps and the file transfer rate becomes 5.3 MiB/s. Is this normal or it should be faster?

Here is my router settings:

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The WDS settings can not be changed to WPS and I don't know if it is related to my problem. Is it possible to increase this speed?

Edit: Speed become 52 mbps does not want to get higher no matter what channel I use !!

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  • WPS is insecure. Even if you could change your WDS settings to WPS you wouldn't want to. Access points with WPS enabled are insecure. It also has nothing to do with your problem. It sounds like the 2.4 GHz band is supersaturated switch to 5.0 GHz which likely will require different hardware.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 1, 2015 at 15:28
  • I have heard "rumours" that TKIP with wireless N is "bad." Try the "WPA-PSK [AES]" option, and ensure that QoS WMM is ON. The 5.3 transfer rate looks like a solid wireless G speed which is, more or less, the fallback mode when QoS is disabled on an N network.
    – Yorik
    Sep 1, 2015 at 16:01
  • FYI, check the docs to ensure you have a wifi device capable of more than one channel. Some are N x 1 or 1x1 or whatever the notation is and these are limited to about 72mbit. This is, technically "up to 300"
    – Yorik
    Sep 1, 2015 at 16:07
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    I can only assume that it enables it by default when you have the appropriate settings chosen. I do note that early in the manual (which I just skimmed) it states that if you do not have WPA2-PSK selected, you cannot achieve faster-than-g speed (page 24 aka PDF page 23)
    – Yorik
    Sep 1, 2015 at 20:50
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    Wifi-to-wifi, the speed should be approximately the speed of the slowest link divided by 17. Wifi-to-wired, the speed should be approximately the speed of the link divided by 8.6. So since you're Wifi to wired, 52 Mbps should give you about 6MB/s and 120 Mbps should give you about 14MB/s. If you're seeing a lot less than that, you likely have some channel interference. (Do not use TKIP. Do not disable WMM.)
    – David Schwartz
    Sep 1, 2015 at 22:49

3 Answers 3

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There is a lot going on during a file transfer. First, there is overhead during the actual transfer. So if you have a transfer rate of 'x' your actual file transfer rate will always be less then 'x' to compensate for the extra overhead in sending packets and transferring files.

Secondly, your wireless speed is measured in bits but your file transfer speed is measured in bytes. To get the file transfer in bits, times everything by 8. So you have 5.3 MB x 8 = 42.4 Mbits per second (if I did the math right)

There's a lot of other devices that operate in the 2.4GHz network that your router is running on. Stick with whatever channel that gives you the best results. This will either be channel 1, 6, or 11.

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  • Disk and file I/O (file transfers) are measured in MebiBytes/sec (MiB/sec: 1,048,576's of 8-bit Bytes). Network and communications speeds are measured in megabits/sec (Mb/sec: 1,000,000's of 1-bit bits). So you need to multiply by 8.388608 (I usually round this to 8.4 for simplicity's sake) to convert from the way file transfer speeds are typically reported to the way network speeds are typically reported. This seems a little nit-picky at MiB/sec vs. Mb/sec, but it matters more at GiB/sec vs. Gb/sec, where a multiplier of 9 is a more accurate estimate than 8 (and 8.6 is more accurate still).
    – Spiff
    Sep 1, 2015 at 20:32
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The increase of speed due to changeing the channel suggests that there are other router broadcasting on the same channel and thus interfering with each other. By switching to a different channel you chose one, where fewer iterferences are.

There are tools like inssider which are able to show you how much is going on a channel. Choosing the one channel where the fewest broadcasting router are is best.

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  • what is transfer rates from your provided ? I mean is 120mbps is normal speed from N150 dongle to N300 Router and there is no server as I said it is only laptop and PC
    – zac
    Sep 1, 2015 at 14:08
  • @Welliam, oh; I'm sorry. Then I missunderstood you. But the rest still applies.
    – ap0
    Sep 1, 2015 at 14:10
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That's basically the best you can expect from the equipment you've paid for.

The rule of thumb for throughput of pure TCP/IPv4 over 802.11n with reasonable 802.11n-layer packet aggregation is about 75% of the PHY rate. By picking a better channel, you increased your PHY rate to 120Mbps, so pure TCP should get 90Mbps, which is 10.7 MiB/sec.

Maybe you're not always getting the 120Mbps PHY rate, and maybe you're using a remote filesystem protocol like SMB that adds its own overhead, or your client or server software is suboptimal. Or a combination of all of those. So a file transfer rate of 5.3 MebiBytes/sec (which is what I think you meant by "5.3 mb/s", judging from context) seems reasonable. The absolute theoretical max throughput your N150 dongle could handle in perfect conditions is 13.4 MiB/sec.

It's 2015. If you want to go fast, buy 3x3:3 802.11ac gear and go 1300Mbps. 300Mbps hasn't been "fast" since 450Mbps 3x3:3 802.11n gear started hitting the market in 2009. 150Mbps N was never "fast" because when N gear first hit the market, everyone did the 2x2:2 300Mbps flavor. Even with a 2x2:2 802.11ac USB dongle which can only do 867Mbps max PHY rate (it's hard to make a good 3x3:3 802.11ac 1300Mbps USB dongle, so I don't think anyone does), you could get close to 80 MiB/sec file transfers in ideal conditions, but I'd be happy with 60MiB/sec with that kind of gear under real-world conditions.

So assuming your client machine has a USB3 port, you could get an order of magnitude better throughput by upgrading your Wi-Fi AP and dongle to something reasonably modern.

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  • thanks, I know how to pick an AC router but please give me suggestion for wifi dongle that can give me high speed.
    – zac
    Sep 2, 2015 at 11:24
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    @Welliam Anything that claims to be 867Mbps 802.11ac and connects via USB3 is good enough. An ASUS USB AC56 is a fine choice.
    – Spiff
    Sep 2, 2015 at 14:27

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