I had a friend that had some problems with his Linksys wrt54g (version 8) wireless router. The problem was that via ethernet, the speed was acceptable; however, over wireless, the speed dropped off to well over half speed (indeed it was more like he was only getting 1/3 to 1/4 the speed he should have). If affected both of his computers as well as anyone else who hooked up wirelessly. I looked and looked for a solution.
I tried tweaking the wireless settings, g only, channel setting (tried several of them), the MTU, and just about everything else that I could find. But nothing worked. He was still getting poor wireless bandwidth but acceptable wired bandwidth.
As a last ditch effort, I flashed the router. I hated to do that because I was worried about bricking it…but I ran out of ideas. His router had the original version 8.0 firmware on it and linksys had a newer version available (I think it was 8.05 or something). The release notes didn’t say anything about fixing wireless speed, but I was out of ideas. He was willing to let me flash it, so I did. Lo and behold, post-flashing, the speed issue was fixed.
I don’t know what the problem was. I think it was some problem with the version 8.0 firmware and not a harware issue. Why else would it have worked?
Oh well, i’m blogging this in the hopes to help someone else out there that is having the same problem. I searched and searched on the net and no one ever mentioned this problem or idea. If you find the article…good luck.
Picture from everdaniel