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[puablo]

Been trying to diagnose slowness through my DIR-655 router for weeks, finally I realized the problem can be reduced to something simple: I sit my laptop directly adjacent to my router, I have 100% signal and no noise, I ping the router, and I get <1ms, <1ms, <1ms, 155ms, 68ms, <1ms, <1ms... repeat. My record is 10 <1ms pings in a row, but not much more. Naturally when I am pinging the internet the times are more ****ounced, but basically the same thing, add 150ms every few pings. But using my router ping test, I have tried pretty much every setting available on the router. Disabled encryption completely, QoS, UPnP, WISH, etc. Tried a full array of channel / bandwidth changes. In all cases, I maintain a perfect 100% signal, but pings still behave this way.

It's a new Dell Studio laptop, Win7 64-bit, with a Dell 1520 Wireless-N card, Broadcom chipset I believe. For all I know it could be a problem with the laptop. Any thoughts?

[puablo]

Figures. It's always after you think you exhausted every other option and ask for help that you fix your problem. I am crossing my fingers to hope it lasts, but it is fixed.

The problem was, thankfully, NOT the router. It's my stupid Dell laptop. It was installed with the Microsoft driver for the wireless adapter. Nothing new was in Windows Update or Dell's site but if I used the Dell CD of "utilities already installed on your computer" (lies!) I forcibly reinstalled the wireless adapter driver. Surprise! It's a newer driver from Broadcom. My response time through this router is now 100% 1ms even when 2 floors away!. Whew! Let's hope it stays that way.

[puablo]

Yeah... it didn't stay that way. At this point I still blame the adapter and not the router but if anyone else has ever experienced & solved the same problem I would love to hear any advice.

[Mackerel]

What protection setup do you use? WPA2? Difference in implementation and key-regeneration could impact. What setting do you use on router?

[puablo]

I am currently using WPA2-Personal with an AES cipher, however I tried to rule that out by switching to no encryption at all, and the problem still occurs. The SSID is not broadcasting, but I have also tried making it visible and have the same result. The only thing that has worked so far - or at least was perceived to work - was the first time I replaced the adapter driver on the laptop. Once I changed away from that driver, the problem returned, and reverting to that formerly-working driver still has the problem. So either it was a fluke, or possibly one of the myriad settings in the driver's advanced setup page.

What is crazy is how predictable the pings are, which is why I believed the initial driver change was the solution. If I ping my router 30 times, it is virtually always <1ms for a few pings, 150, 50, 70, 150, 50, <1 ms for about seven pings, repeat. It is as though something is causing the high ping every 10 seconds.

[Mackerel]

And signal is 100%, and low noise? 'cause this looks a lot like a regular interference...

[puablo]

Right. I can sit the laptop directly next to the router and have a 100% signal (as described by the router and Dell's rather nice WLAN monitor), and I still get ping spikes. I can move 2 floors away and get an 80% signal, same ping spikes. But most of my tests are next to the router.

When I briefly thought it was fixed I was getting 100% <1ms pings for hours even if I moved far enough away to get 80% signal. But it came back after I changed the driver again.

I am starting to think that this is the Windows 7 (and Vista) WLAN AutoConfig issue where if Windows manages your wireless connection, it periodically scans for other networks and spikes your lag times. I can't prove it though, and my lag spikes are really every 10 seconds, which sounds too frequent for that problem.

[puablo]

I should point out that another reason why I am currently suspecting Windows 7's WLAN service, is that if I stop the WLAN Service (which disables all wireless abilities), then restart it, I get 100% perfect pings again. I had done this yesterday and thought that solved it, but later the problem returned. Still, as of right now, I can get regular, always reproduceable ~150ms pings every 10 seconds, and this service restart causes that regular ping to go away.

This is of course after Windows 7 boots. A simple reboot doesn't have this magic fix, I have to specifically restart the service manually. I'd love to try out the "delayed start" service option, but the WLAN Service doesn't allow that setting to be used.