Tortoise and the Hare [solved]

[SilverSurfer60]

My poor old laptop again. The thing is I want to use wpa instead of wep encryption on the wifi network. This laptop does not have a ethernet card otherwise I would use that instead of wifi.

The hare is an old Sitecom WN-PCC-01 IEEE 802.11b and it has a transfer rate of approximately 128 kb/s, however it is not compatible with wpa.

The tortoise is a new Belkin 802.11g 54mbps and is fully compatible with wpa, installing it is a breeze, however I can only get a transfer rate of around 32 kb/s.

I have tried this card using wep but it is the same result. The MTU is the same for both cards. There are no errors recorded in the log files and no errors recorded with iwconfig/ifconfig after a session.

 

I'm at a loss as to where to start looking now.

Any help will be appreciated.

Thank You in advance.

[tyme]

Is your wireless access point 802.11g capable? And 802.11g card should run faster than 802.11b, no questions asked. Another possibility is that you have an appliance that is interfering with the 802.11g connection, but this is a rare occurrence.

Edited January 23, 2009 by tyme

[SilverSurfer60]

Thank you Tyme but the access point is capable of 802.11g.

With regards to the interference, this is a possibility which I am going to have to try and resolve, if indeed this is a cause as I am getting another entirely different unrelated problem which could be caused by interference. Something I have introduced to my property around early December 2008. At least that's when it manifested but could have been introduced earlier.

[ffi]

move next to the access point and see which one is faster?

[SilverSurfer60]

Thank you for that Ffi. I have already sat in the same room as the ap with no difference. I have ruled out the interference that I thought may be a cause for concern. In fact I have rectified the problem. I have now found another use for the card as it fits neatly under my table leg and stops it rocking. Thank you I'll call it solved as I will go get another one.

[ffi]

wireless cards are cheap enough, not worth the endless days of troubleshooting :)

 

 

 

 

if you're laptop has mini pci or mini pci-express I would recommend one of those cards because you could make use of your laptops inbuilt antenna (even if it did have a card to begin with...)

[Greg2]

You've never really told us what chipset the Sitecom card has. If it's a Prism2/2.5/3 chipset, you could update the intersil-prism firmware, then use the hostap module, hostapd, hostap-utils, with wpa_supplicant for a WPA access point. I've upgraded my old SMC card that uses a Prism2 chipset. I upgraded the old v1.3.6 station firmware to 1.8.2 and it works great. Unfortunately, I'm currently only using WEP because of my other (PITA) Broadcom BCM4318 and Texas Instruments ACX100 chipsets.

 

If you want to upgrade the firmware, here's the instructions and links to primary and station firmware: Flashing Intersil Prism Chipsets

 

I believe this is a success story about your card: Sitecom_PCMCIA

[SilverSurfer60]

Many thanks Greg, I must admit I never even thought of doing a firmware upgrade to the Sitecom. It may be an old card but it works well, good range and very rarely drops the signal.It does require orinoco_cs to co-operate. I'll certainly give it a try. The Belkin stays where it is though, unless it progresses to the bin. Thank you again. I'll post back with the progress.

Edited January 26, 2009 by SilverSurfer60

[SilverSurfer60]

Update: The card is too old there is no firmware for my card. Ah well guess I will have to part with a tenner.

[solved]