Help Wifi painfully slow... WPA?

[lem]

So I have my G1 for a few days now, and of course, as soon as I unpacked it, I enabled wifi and connected to my home network secured with WPA+preshared key. No problems, but things didn't seem as fast as advertised....

Then the next day I went on to check something on a web while not at home, and... speed was great! What?

Back at home downloaded one of the speed checkers from the market and... While connected to my home wifi speed barely reaches 100Kbit/s downstream (even when in the same room and within direct sight of router)... Killed wifi, and I get 650+Kbit over 3G easily... Now, my next door neighbor has an unsecured wifi (I told him a few times, but he just refuses to do anything about it, long story), so... I connected to his wifi, and viola - 2.5MB on the first try...

Now, is that just me? Or someone else has something similar?
My router is Verizon's Actiontec MI424-WR running firmware 4.0.16.1.45.160 and it's working just fine with my laptop (over 10MB anytime and from anywhere in the house). Is WPA to blame? I don't want (yet) to disable it and set to WEP or oper, because that will mess up my wireless network for other devices, so first, maybe someone has a suggestion on how to make it work with WPA?

Any help is appreciated!
LEM.

 

[RevWillie]

When mine is connecting properly, the speed on wifi is outstanding. It just seems like I have to turn wifi on and off once or twice to get it to 'catch'. I can have a pristine connection, but for some reason, data won't go through.

Now, if I am getting a good 3G signal, my perception is that the data throughput is as good if not better than 54g wifi, but I don't know what all is going on. The wifi and 3G indicators only tell me so much.

 

[lem]

When mine is connecting properly, the speed on wifi is outstanding. It just seems like I have to turn wifi on and off once or twice to get it to 'catch'. I can have a pristine connection, but for some reason, data won't go through.

Now, if I am getting a good 3G signal, my perception is that the data throughput is as good if not better than 54g wifi, but I don't know what all is going on. The wifi and 3G indicators only tell me so much.

Well, I've tried to re-connect a countless number of times with the same result. When I start the speed test right after connecting, sometimes it hits 1.5Mbit/s for a moment, then falls back to 100Kb. I've rebooted the phone, the router, enabled and disabled wifi in what seemed to be every possible order. No avail. Connects nicely, never a problem, but speed is just not there!

Edit: Occasionally it does hit 200 or even 300K mark, but it is still far far below my wireless network speed, which should be an order of magnitude higher (My internet connection is 20Mb). So I would expect it to be at least 2-3Mb downstream.....

 

[RevWillie]

I'm also seeing symptoms of no DNS connectivity. What I mean is that I can browse to all four of my wired and wireless server devices on my LAN by the specific ip addresses. No issues there. But when I try to browse to a named URL (that would need to be resolved in DNS to its specific IP address), I cannot connect. I have seen this happen with different wifi devices in the past. I don't use comcast's DNS servers anymore because of it, but for some reason the DHCP server on my router-firewall and the G1 are not communicating DNS info correctly. I need to investigate further.

 

[richy240]

No DNS or WPA issues here...

Comcast (or whatever) isn't going to resolve your hosts on your local network, and unless you're using Windows NetBIOS names (which resolves via broadcast, even over TCP/IP - and won't work on your phone, mind you), you're not going to resolve internal hosts without internal DNS. I've seen some routers resolve internal names, but not many.

If you're trying to resolve internal hosts, I'd recommend getting some DNS software and using that - surely there's something free out there you can use. And if you're having problems resolving external hosts, OpenDNS is a great service that I highly recommend - I use it myself at home and at many, many clients' offices for name resolution.

As for WiFi speeds, I can't help you there. I've been very pleased with the G1's WiFi speeds,a dn the speed at which it connects to the network. Maybe you have a bad unit? I hate to jumpt o conclusions, but...

 

[RevWillie]

I'm sorry, richy, Either you didn't read my post carefully, or we have different definitions of DNS resolution.

I don't use comcast's DNS servers anymore because they were always going down. I use three different free DNS servers. I'm also following up on your OpenDNS suggestion.

I don't have any problem with internal hosts. I don't use or need to use DNS for those. I know their ip addresses by heart.

This is what happens for me: I surf to yahoo.com on 3G...no problem. I enable wifi. I surf to buy.com. I get the error that the web site cannot be found. I surf to 192.168.1.250. The web console for that device opens right up at wifi speed. I disable wifi and 3g comes back on. I surf to buy.com again and it goes right through at 3g speed. I enable wifi again. From then on, at least until I power cycle the phone, I can go back to buy.com over and over again at wifi speed.

 

[RevWillie]

Just want to say thanks to richy240.

I switched my router to look at the OpenDNS servers and haven't had any further issues with my wifi connection. Hard to believe that such a simple change would be so effective.

 

[lem]

Well, this thread went way off from the original question as to why my G1 is so slow on my WPA network, but I think I found a solution on my own, and since I started it, I'll share my findings so that maybe it will be useful to others.

The caveat seems to be the encryption algorithm. My wireless network used the more secure AES encryption on WPA network (no WPA2 on my router). When I switched it to older TKIP, problem disappeared. Now I can clock 3+ megabits/sec on G1 with no problems! So the ultimate problem turns out to be - AES is an encryption algorithm that is too CPU intensive to be practical on G1...

Case solved.

LEM.

P.S.
Hm... I think now I know why my brother's handheld didn't even want to connect to my Wi-Fi in a first place!

 

[geanoelias]

That`s how I fix the problem.

I have a DLINK DIR 300 router and the mobile, a samsung 5500, it was connecting with same IP of my computer. Then when my laptop is off my mobile wifi works perfectly. So in this case was a IP conflict.

Now with my computer off, I first turn the mobile wifi on then after a turn my computer on. This way, both devices get diferent IPs and they both can work togheter.

So if someone has detected the same reason of the wifi problem and has a more samart way to fix it please dont forget to tell us.