Netgear MR814v2 wireless router and Airport Card (802.11b) kind of slow?

[pdp76]

I just installed a MR814v2 wireless router. The router seems to work ok, my wired connections are decent, not quite as fast as my non-wireless Netgear RP614v2, but more than tolerable.

The wireless side of things, however, has been giving me headaches. With all the non-Airport Cards (again 802.11b) I seem to be getting decent throughput wirelessly: I get ~500kB/s downstream from router to wireless NIC and I get ~700kB/s upstream from wireless NIC to router.

When I used my iBook with an Airport card: I get on average ~50kB/s downstream from the router, and ~600kB/s upstream to the router.

I have great signal strength in all my tests, I am within 10 feet of the router, and clean line of sight. On all my tests, I just FTP a 4MB file to and from a Windows XP FTP server which is connected by ethernet cable to one of the ports on the MR814v2.

I do have 64-bit WEP enabled, but disabling it doens't seem to make a difference. I'm running Airport 3.4.1 on OS X 10.3.4. I have firmware version 5.3_05 on the MR814v2 router.

Has anyone else experience the very poor downstream throughput with the combination of an Airport and the MR814v2? Also, I'm also curious why, even on non-Airport clients, downstream data seems to be a bit slower than upstream (though not a big deal).

Thanks in advance.

 

[Zammy-Sam]

Hi pdp76 and welcome to the forum.
I am wondering if you have two macs in your network and if you tested apple talk between wired and wireless lan. Am not sure, but maybe something is not proper with your ftp settings (at least for pc <-> mac). How does browsing work? Do you have an internetconnection faster than 50kb/sec to test a download?
I have no idea why downstream is slightly lower in the bandwidth than upstream. Maybe it has something to do with the 802.11b protocol?!