[RESOLVED] Wireless Network Latency Spike

[JD.Thompson]

Hello,

I recently purchased a NetGear MR814 802.11b wireless router and two NetGear 802.11b Wireless USB Adapters for each desktop in my apartment.

My home network is working fine except when I do a continuous ping to the router from either computer the ping stays between 2 to 4 ms; however, the ping will jump to 3000-4000 ms every 15 to 30 seconds. If I connect a computer directly to the router with a cat5 cable I do not experience this problem so it most likely has to do with the wireless segment.

The signal strength is full strength at excellent, WEP is disabled, I upgraded the firmware of the router to the newest version and confirmed the wireless USB device has the newest driver, I tried lowering the fragmentation and RTS threshold and the preamble type on the wireless adapter (although the router reported no collisions at all), changing the packet sizes did not effect the periodical lag at all, and both computers are running Windows XP.

Where should I go from here?

Thanks for your time,

Jack Thompson

[cszeto]

You may try switching to a different channel for your wireless access point. You might be catching some periodic interference on your current wireless channel.

[JD.Thompson]

Thanks for the input cszeto, unfortunatly, changing the channels apears to have no effect on this odd problem.

[cszeto]

Then this is may be a firmware issue on the router itself. I have a MR314 and it had past issues like that on the older firmware revisions.

A possible test to isolate the router, is to put both your wireless adapters into "adhoc" mode to see if the latency still pops up. The latency should not surface between the two desktops while pinging each other in "adhoc" mode, if this issue is related to the router somehow.

[JD.Thompson]

I have found the problem is with the Wireless Zero Configuration Service in Windows XP. It is designed to automatically configure 801.11 adapters. However the MA101 Netgear adapter seams to be buggy using this. Note: in Win 2k and 98 I have tested this adapter with no problems (Netgear provides there own software for 2k and 98 unlike XP). If I allow Wireless Zero Configuration to run and connect the adapter and subsequently manually stopping the service I then no longer receive periodical latency spikes.

Now my question is: Can I manually configure the adapter without this service? If so is it possible to do this automatically on startup with something like a batch file.

[cszeto]

I'm not sure. I had the Wireless Zero Configuration running very well with my D-Link adapter, but XP on my notebook "checked out" recently and I have not had a chance to get it running again.

If the Wireless Zero Configuration is working for the initial configuration and things will continue to work when you disable the service afterwards, then maybe you can disable the service via the "net stop" command on either the command prompt or within a batch file. The batch file can even be placed into the Startup Group, so that it is executed when ever you login after boot up.

The syntax is - net stop "service name"

[JD.Thompson]

The syntax is - net stop "service name"
Exactly what I needed to know thank you!

After previously looking around I found this is a common problem for the MA101 adapter but like you said the WZC works fine with other adapters. Anyhow fortunately the adapter connects before the computer gets around to the startup folder so using a batch file in there is a valid solution.

Thanks again for your help cszeto :D

[cszeto]

I'm glad that works out for you.