The Situation:
When I try to transfer a file from one computer to another that are both connected via wireless on a WRT54GL (in a office) with dd-wrt firmware I often get bad speeds. In generally they average around 100 kilobytes a second. Either computer can download via wireless from the Internet at at about 2 megabytes a second. The speed is slow with the transfer of one large file.

There are about 20 other wireless networks that the computers can see, so there is a lot of noise, but I don't have the equipment to really monitor the frequencies well. But that still seems pretty slow. I thought maybe it was the transmit on each card, but even when they are 5 feet away with a line of sight I still get these speeds. According to Linux both cards are operating at 54g.

My Questions:

• Is this normal for this sort of consumer level wireless equipment?
• Anything I can do to improve it?
• why is wireless to wireless transfer slow when everything else isn't?
• Whats steps might I take to figure out what is happening? For example, are lots of packets not making to the access point requiring retransmissions?

Above all, I want to find out what the problem actually is. This may seem odd, but at this point I am more interested in understanding what the problem is than fixing it.

What I have tried:
I have tried messing with lots of settings. Different channels, xmit power, G-Only, none of which has made anything any better. I've also tried upgrading to newer dd-wrt firmware version and doing a reset to wipe out the settings.