Does your bandwith fluctuate wildly?

[BNPMike]

I have a 3Com 802.11g Access point which I bought because there was a deal where you effectively got a matching pc card free. Not checking before, I then found they don't do a workstation card for 802.11g so I had to buy a Buffalo. The Buffalo card manager doesn't give much information about non-Buffalo access points.

Any way it worked as soon as I connected it to the pc so I haven't bothered much. However just recently I noticed you can get a display that shows bandwith. For no reason I can see (no microwave ovens etc, no other pc on the network) the bandwith fluctuates from 54Mbs down to 1 Mbs minute by minute.

What I have noticed particularly is the bandwith always seems to drop when the pc is passing data. The card proclaims high bandwith whilst it's idling but doesn't deliver once real traffic starts moving.

Is this common?

 

[BNPMike]

The client manager shows 'condition' as a percentage and 'bandwith' as Mbps. These both change constantly. As we speak I have 63% and 48 Mbps. Next minute I'll have 33% and 1Mbps. I can't see why.

 

[bcastner]

I think you are seeing the Beacon interval. On most clients and access points you can reduce this if you choose. It is not a good idea to stray far from the default for access points.

Overall, it matters not a great deal, but it does look dramatic with a display such as NetStumbler.

 

[BNPMike]

bcastner Maybe I've just spotted what you are saying. Perhaps the network statistics are actually coming from some management frames (obviously of a standard type as it' 3Com talking to Buffallo) and when a lot of data frames are being transmitted, the management frames are affected in some way. So I might still be getting good throughput. I'll have to check out the vendor sites.