Adding one more wireless router slows things down?

[tuqqer]

I have a new wireless network set up. Point A is a half mile from Point B, where I'm at. And so far it's working really well. I was getting speeds of over 6 megs download when it first when up yesterday afternoon.

However, we added one more wireless router late last night at Point A, and since then, speeds have dropped to under 2 megs.

The person at Point A hardly ever uses her network (no heavy downloads at all). And we're way in farmland, so there's no other homes around that could be using the signal. But could that wifi router somehow be the reason for the slowdown?

It's obviously too early to tell if this 2 meg speed is now the norm, and it could go back up to the 6 range later today. But the coincidence of adding that router, around the time of the slowdown, makes me wonder.

thanks for any thoughts.

[Andrew]

Is the DHCP server on on the second router? You can only have one DHCP server per network before things get screwy, and I think it is usually on by default.

[Frank Pardue]

You didn't really supply enough info to offer much advice. Info like what is the purpose of the second router, how does it connect to the network, is it functioning as a relay point for the primary router at Point A, or is it serving to supply another wireless connection to a Point C. If it is suppling another connection then yes it can/will slow down your connection if a lot of data is being downloaded over it at the same time as you are doing a download. As an example lets assume that the ISP connection at point A has a max speed of 6 Mbps, but that feeds two connections, you at point B and a second at Point C. If PointB and C are both downloading big files at the same time, then the 6 Mbps has to be split between the two outgoing connections, under ideal conditions each connection would have a max speed of 3 Mbps. But ideal conditions rarely exist, so in all likelyhood one of the server will be faster than the other, so a 4/2 Mbps split could easily occur. Plus some servers can be very busy so even if the 6 Mbps connection isn't full you may still only get a 2 Mbps download speed, or maybe your ISP servers are busy, so the download speed is less than the max. I would use a download speed test site like the one linked below to test speed at different times over several days and see what kind of results you get.

http://www.dslreports.com/stest

[tuqqer]

Thanks for the responses. You're right, I don't have enough info yet, mainly because of the time factor, but also because I had help getting it all set up. Once I get the schematic from him, I'll report back.

The woman who uses the new wireless router hardly uses her computer at all. No large downloads, etc. And because that new router is a half-mile away, I'm wondering if it being on DHCP would matter. Still, what I plan on doing is unplugging hers just to test my speeds. I'll also check speeds throughout each day for the next few days. It does seem odd that it would drop that much tho, from 6m to 1.5 megs.

I'll report back.