Wireless internet connection

ekimeno

ekimeno

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Mike
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Hi, wondering if any computer/internet gurus may be able to help.

I've recently moved into a new house and sharing with people that already have an internet connection which is transmitted wirelessly from a Belkin 54G router. Now I'm able to up and download to and from the web at slowish but acceptable speeds (about 60kbps up and 300 kbps down actual speed) which suits me fine. The problem I'm having is web pages... pages sometimes don't load or half-load without images and sometimes they load without any problems.

So question is - what's going on? Why is the internet up'ing and downloading fine but web pages have problems loading? I'm using an iMac 2.4Ghz Core-2 duo running latest Leopard and Firefox (but problem is also happening in Safari). BTW, my previous internet connection was also wireless to a BT homehub and that worked flawlessly. Any help would be appreciated.
 
Could be a couple of things. It may be that there are too many users on the network. That would slow things down. Also the range from the router and or signal quality can cause problems.

Do you know how many people are on line at any one time and how far away from the router are you. Don't forget walls can cause signal loss as well
 
could be the area dude.. only getting half a page!! thats enough my boy...

Dont worry about the quality, feel the width...;)
 
We previously had a Belkin router and had the same problems on a Virgin Media 10mbit connection. We changed the router for a Netgear one. Same spec. Anyway the problem disappeared and all three PC's in our house share the connection and get full pages, fast downloads etc. We put it down to the Belkin router. I wouldn't buy another.
 
My guess is that the most likely problem is interference from other wireless networks in the vicinity.

We were having no end of problems with our Linksys wireless router. Suddenly, the network would either disappear or go very slow. When I looked at the available networks, there was one that popped up from time to time on the same channel as our network (channel 6). Quite often we'd see six or seven networks come up. Not good :(

So I changed to channel 3. I was a bit worried about doing this as the 802.11 specs suggest that you should have separation of 5 channels between networks - which is why most routers seem to come pre-configured with either channel 1, 6 or 11.

It worked fine.

This weekend, I migrated off Virginmedia onto BT broadband with a homehub2. Had exactly the same problems. When I looked at the config, it was set to channel 6. So I changed to channel 3 and it now flies.

I had a word with about this with a colleague in our team who knows a lot about wifi. His view was that cross-channel interference is better than co channel interference and he was right.

So my advice is to check which channel your router is set to and change it.


Hope this helps.

Cheers

Mark
 
kiasdad said:
My guess is that the most likely problem is interference from other wireless networks in the vicinity.

We were having no end of problems with our Linksys wireless router. Suddenly, the network would either disappear or go very slow. When I looked at the available networks, there was one that popped up from time to time on the same channel as our network (channel 6). Quite often we'd see six or seven networks come up. Not good :(

So I changed to channel 3. I was a bit worried about doing this as the 802.11 specs suggest that you should have separation of 5 channels between networks - which is why most routers seem to come pre-configured with either channel 1, 6 or 11.

It worked fine.

This weekend, I migrated off Virginmedia onto BT broadband with a homehub2. Had exactly the same problems. When I looked at the config, it was set to channel 6. So I changed to channel 3 and it now flies.

I had a word with about this with a colleague in our team who knows a lot about wifi. His view was that cross-channel interference is better than co channel interference and he was right.

So my advice is to check which channel your router is set to and change it.


Hope this helps.

Cheers

Mark
Click to expand...

Thanks for this advice, Mark. I have now changed the channel to no 3 as I could see there were other routers on channel 1, 6 and 11. I also tried connecting directly to the router with an ethernet cable and I'm experiencing exacting the same problem.

I'm baffled! So it's definitely not the wireless connection. Also, just to add a further element of confusion- my other 3 housemates (2 pc's and 1 other mac) all connect to the router wirelessly and have zero problems...
 
Hmmmmm. Odd. Looks specifc to your machine.
I did a quick google using 'apple iMac slow internet' as my parameters and was surprised at how many hits there were.
Several pointed to clearing the cache
Some suggested reinstalling the os or using a disk cleaning utility (both a bit extreme imho)

There were some that suggested a dns issue - have a look at http://forums.macworld.com/message/472241

I ought to say that I know nothing about macs.


Hope this helps Mike,

Cheers

Mark
 
I've exhausted all these options except reinstalling the OS. I guess I'll have to try this as well as I am getting very poor internet at home.

Thanks for your help, Mark.
 
I wonder if this might be a Java problem, have you got the latest version?

Have you tried loading the problem web pages with your firewall off?

I know nothing of Macs by the way.
 
Mikesphotaes said:
I wonder if this might be a Java problem, have you got the latest version?

Have you tried loading the problem web pages with your firewall off?

I know nothing of Macs by the way.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm busy doing an update after a full re-install earlier today... hopefully this will sort everything out (although so far a full re-install hasn't improved the internet performance at all).

My only option after this is probably to buy a cheap pc netbook to do my internet surfing on, but this seems ridiculous...:(
 
could it be something to do with the encryption. I dont have a mac or know much about them but I know that some network adapters only work with WPA now and not WEP.
If the router is set to WEP then you might just get a connection now and then but it wouldnt work right.
Newer things run on WPA I think.
 
Well, I've finally worked out what the problem was......... Firefox.

It seems Firefox doesn't like my new ISP, which is so strange as I've been a fan of this browser for many years and it's never given me any problems.

Safari has come to the rescue and for the first time since moving into my new place 4 weeks ago, I have smooth, fast web pages loading.

The mind boggles :shrug:
 
Have you tried Google's Chrome?
 
No, Safari seems to be doing the trick. The only site that's not loading all the time for me now is this one.... :thinking:
 
Ah, damn - just noticed some more problems using Safari as well. Yes, it's a timing out issue... timing out when trying to connect to Jalbum on my website and also times out sporadically on this forum.
 
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