Ben Ruset Sysadmin, etc.

Maybe It’s Me: 802.11n Sucks.

The other day I went out and bought a Linksys WRT310N router. It's a 802.11 draft N router with a four port GigE switch on the back. It also will run DD-WRT. Sweet!

So I get it all set up, flash it to DD-WRT v24 and get my network back together. I see that my Mac connected to it a 130mbps, in N mode. Alright.

Time to test the speed. Mount my NFS share, open a H.264 encoded video and... still choppy like it was with my old Linksys WRV54G.

I drop into bash and dd myself a 100mb test file. (UNIX workstations rule.) FTP that over to my (locally connected via GigE) server. Ugh, 3MB/s.

After talking with Don and Youse, I switch the router over to channel 11. Speed increases marginally.

I reset it to defaults, and this time don't turn on encryption. Hrm, 10MB/s. Better. Turn on WPA2, back down to 3-4MB/s. Drop down to WPA. Same thing. I fire up my old Dell laptop - I get slower speeds, so I know it's not my Mac.

Unfortunately this version of DD-WRT is kind of weird, and will not allow me to flash the original Linksys firmware back.

Everything I read shows that I should be getting far better speeds than what I am seeing, and certainly not a more than 50% drop when turning encryption on.

For laughs I fire up my old WRV54G. I get ~3MB/s doing the same test.

Two things I realized:

a) I wish I had tested this with the original Linksys firmware. DD-WRT seems flakey on this device, and support from their forums is just non-existant.

b) I wish I had bought an Airport Extreme, which has a better chance of "just working" right out of the box.

I'd be curious to see what sort of speeds people were getting on their 802.11n connections.