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I have a Cisco E3200 Wireless N dual band router and external drive with USB2 support attached to it. The drive is shared across my network. My laptop has G WiFi adapter, so it can connect with 54Mbps only (which is ~6MB per second). I also have USB Wireless N adapter that supports up to 150Mbps.

When I copy my files from shared hard drive to my local folders it copies with speed 2.5MB/s and changing my WiFi adapter has no effect. It doesn't matter whether I am connected with 150Mbps or 54, the copying speed is the same - 2.5MB/s which is not enough for HD streaming; I have serious lag issues when I try to watch HD movies. When I disable WiFi and connect with a network cable, I see the speed is about 10-11MB/s - this is good enough. I can't understand what the problem is. Signal quality is 100%, security is WPA2 Personal.

  1. Why is there no difference between 54Mbps and 150Mbps?
  2. Why are files copied with a speed of 2.5MB/s in the 54Mbps network?
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  • Can't you post not programming questions here?
    – axe
    Dec 2, 2011 at 19:38
  • You can, but they will get magically migrated
    – Oleg Mikheev
    Dec 2, 2011 at 19:39
  • Do you mean it's not allowed? I don't see where it says that this is only programming forum. I can see corresponding tags. Is there any other forum for that?
    – axe
    Dec 2, 2011 at 19:41
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    stackoverflow.com/faq
    – Oleg Mikheev
    Dec 2, 2011 at 19:43
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    In networking, case matters when talking about speeds. Mb and MB mean very different things, and I suspect there are a few cases where you used the former and meant the latter.
    – Joel Coehoorn
    Dec 9, 2011 at 14:25

2 Answers 2

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The Router: Little known fact about most wireless routers is that they are "oldest technology wins" This means if you have a single band router and there is the presence of a wireless-G device then that sets the wireless protocol for ALL devices to wireless-G. The only routers that work around this are the multiband routers where you have to set up two SSIDs (one typically is defaulted as " 5g" (ex: Nexus 5G). Your best bet for a fast data transfer is to set the WiFi to 'N-only' and connect the 'G' laptop to an Ethernet port.

The USB: USB 1.1 have a limit of about 12 Mbit/s (1.5 MB/s) check that the device that you are plugged into can support the USB2 device you are plugging into it.

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I have fought with older equipment, and can say I finally put put a more modern card in my laptop and went to 802.11ac, it works much better.

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