Slow wireless

[Greg Stark]

I have a problem with my hostap wireless network -- it's too slow. 

The card is only an 11Mb/s WMP11 but still that should be plenty for my needs.
Instead I'm seeing a maximum of about 300kbytes/s when I'm sitting directly
beside the access point. And when I move to the next room I see it around
80kbytes/s (actually it jumps around quite a bit between 40kbytes/s to
110kbytes/s).

The hostap box is actually a pretty slow cpu so 300kbytes/s may actually be
about as fast as it can go. That's about as fast as I see on my upstream
connections. But there's really no reason I can imagine to be seeing the
abysmal numbers in the area of 100kbytes/s.

I'm not using WEP (yet), and I'm testing by doing a straight wget from the
wireless client to the web server on a machine hooked up to the router via
100Mb/s ethernet.

In the logs I see the rate jumping around between 1MB/s, 2MB/s, 5.5MB/s, and
11MB/s. And the noise floor seems awfully high on the client end. But I don't
know where to go from here debugging this.

>From the hostap server:

# iwconfig wifi0 
wifi0     IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"test"  
          Mode:Master  Frequency:2.422 GHz  Access Point: 00:06:25:A7:43:2B   
          Bit Rate:5.5 Mb/s   Sensitivity=1/3  
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off

# iwconfig wlan0
wlan0     IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"test"  
          Mode:Master  Frequency:2.422 GHz  Access Point: 00:06:25:A7:43:2B   
          Bit Rate:5.5 Mb/s   Sensitivity=1/3  
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:11  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:2659  Invalid misc:409   Missed beacon:0


>From the wireless client:

# iwconfig eth1
eth1      IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"test"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.422 GHz  Access Point: 00:06:25:A7:43:2B   
          Bit Rate:11 Mb/s   Tx-Power:15 dBm   
          Retry limit:15   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=96/100  Signal level=-32 dBm  Noise level=-33 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:670390   Missed beacon:0


What other information would be helpful for me to figure out what's holding
this network back?

-- 
greg