After renewing our Internet subscription, I went for shopping in Hawali and got a Belkin N Wireless Router. True, our household has no devices with n-wireless cards, I just wanted it for wider coverage. To reach downstairs for the extender to work, which I didn’t try yet!

I configured it and plugged it in. I noticed that my wireless speed is 5.5 Mbps and if it reached the maximum, it’ll be around 11 Mbps. To double check, I dragged and dropped files from my laptop on our network storage and the speeds were lower than 300 KB/sec!

I know, I couldn’t expect the speed to increase over the max. 54 Mbps supported by b/g wireless network, but to improve a little because I can get a stronger signal thus increasing the speed a bit. But the opposite happened, my speed degraded.

I double checked my wireless configuration and driver updates. Then my router configuration and I configured my channel width as 40 MHz, thinking it’ll offer me more throughput, since I thought it’ll allow more data to be carried. Anyhow, this wasn’t the case.

The Channel-bonding trick can provide a 10 to 20 Mbps throughput increase, but usually works best under strong signal conditions. As signal levels drop, using channel bonding becomes much less effective in providing a throughput boost.

I configured the “bandwidth” back to the default 20 MHz and my wireless connection shows at times  (48 – 54) Mbps, my file exchange is at 1.17 MB/sec.

See more details about “5 Ways To Fix Slow 802.11n Speed“