Why is my wireless so slow compared to my wired download speed?

Posted by Shawn on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Shawn
Published on 2011-06-12T17:28:53Z Indexed on 2012/10/01 3:41 UTC
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wireless-networking

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slow-connection

I just used speedtest.net (using Firefox) to compare my wired connection speed with my wireless connection speed. With my current contract (with Videotron), I'm supposed to get

Download speed: 8Mbps
Upload speed: 1Mbps

Here are the results of the speedtest.net test:

Wired

Ping: 14ms
Download speed: 8.41Mbps
Upload speed: 1.04Mbps

Wireless

Ping: 16ms
Download speed: 0.18Mbps
Upload speed: 0.98Mbps

The difference in download speeds seems staggering to me since I did the test 1 meter aways from my router.

Any clue as to why my wireless download speed is so low compared to my wired download speed?

using Ubuntu 11.04 on an Acer Aspire 5536-5519

Oh and it might be worth mentioning that my girlfriend has no trouble at all with her wireless connection. No slowness at all. (She uses Firefox on Windows 7 on a Dell) Here's the results for the same test on her system:

Ping: 22ms
Download speed; 8.44Mbps
Upload speed: 1.02Mbps

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