Re: Movies, household network and 54g limits... (maybe...)

[Peter Teunissen <lists@onemanifest.net>]

On 11-jan-2008, at 19:03, johnny wrote:

> Hi,
>
> in my flat there are 1 router, 1 range extender, 2 vista, 1 XP and my
> 2 linux ubuntu (one of which is mail/samba/nfs/etc server, is
> monitored via mrtg and contains a lot of music/movies). All, wireless.
>
> The problem: when I listen to music or watch movies from my laptop (my
> flatmates idem) the results are not so good... many freezes...
>
> The graphs say it is clearly not bandwith fault. Reading around:
> "                                                    It is well known
> that the medium access control (MAC) layer is the main bottleneck for
> the IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs."
>
> There are scientific publications around but seems the problem is not
> solved.
>
> 1. Do you know something, please?
>
> 2. With the new N technology, the problem is solved? [I doubt but I
> should test...]

I use 802.11n (Apple Airport Extreme) and get good uninterrupted 10  
MB/s thoughput. Still, when watching a movie I get a few interrupts.  
However, that seems to be related to the fileserver and not so much  
the wireless. I recently switched from an old 4x80MB raid5 set to a  
single 320MB disk (both with netatalk) and noticed a great  
improvement from to much interrupts to endure to allmost none. Still  
I generally copy the file over before playing.

FWIW,


Peter