Issue Accessing Network Drives on Local Wireless Network

Pretty much everyone will tell you wifi is no good for hd. Sure some people will say they do it fine. But it's just not reliable enough.

Have you tried to transfer a file from the internal drive of the desktop? To compare that to the drives connected via usb. Also if your connected at 30mbps the max transfer speed would only be about 4mb/s. So your close to that.

Theoretically 30mbps should be enough for most blu rays. But I'm sure your not getting it constantly.

Your limited by your slowest device. Which sounds like the desktop. You would definitely have better luck if the pc was also connected via wireless n like the laptop. But there's no guarantees.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

30 Mbps is your link rate. You can cut that number in half.

Your file transfer is a crude speed test. It shows 16Mbps. Your desktop wifi connection it just too slow.

Well yes, if it takes 2 hours to transfer a 1 1/2 hour movie, then there is no way you can stream it. Not only is the wifi connection not constant, the movies have a variable bit rate. Your going to want twice the throughput as the bitrate of the movie.

It is not normally wise to spend a lot of money to improve your wireless network to stream Bluray. Just because it is so hard to do. But if you have a junk router, It is nice to have a nice router even in a wired network. Get the router up high on a bookshelf out in the open. On the desktop machine, A quality card with remote antennas will blow away some usb stick.

You might consider powerline adapters for the desktop.

Wifi transmission can be affected by many things:
1. Take a look whether there are neighbors using same channel or adjacent channels. 11n uses at least 20Mhz wide bandwidth and each channel spacing is only 5.5Mhz. So usable channel is really only channel 1, 6 and 11. 5Ghz dual band hardware helps.
2. Take a look whether there are other 2.4Ghz devices around the house such as house phones or another computer. If there are, place the Wifi base-station in direct view of the HTPC and no 2.4Ghz device in between.
3. Make sure there are no passive metallic objects such as metal post directly in between the HTPC Wifi NIC and the base station.
4. Not all hardware work as advertised. Changing to a different design sometimes fix the problem. I changed from a Cisco AE1000 to AE2500 USB NIC and the problem went away. Best antennae coupling is with both vertical at roughly same level. Signal pattern from dipole antennae are like big donut or hoola hoop with transmit antenna in the center. Some designs use patch antennae and hard to say which orientation is best.

I have a HTPC using dual band but movie still lags. I thought the problem was with a main ethernet cable run between two floors but it wasn't. 1Gb ethernet requires all pairs in the cable working but with a missing pair, 100Mb would still work. However my cable run checked out with a tester.

For item 3 above, that gray post at left front did block Wifi but moving the NIC (black vertical stick) to the left solved the problem.

Edited by dksc318 - 7/29/12 at 3:50pm