[manchesterwireless] Linksys WRT54G and WDS mode

[Andy Gauton]

Hi All,

Warrington Wireless got a major bandwidth boost last week following an ISP 
upgrade (who, what and how is not open to discussion I'm afraid for obvious 
reasons)

Unforuntately, I'm currently the last hop on a WDS setup. Before, I didn't 
experience the bandwidth drop of WDS, however now I'm getting  50% (~4.5MB) 
of the total (~9MB). We were at ~3MB. Nice increase :)

Currently running Alchemy firmware with 3x WRT54G running WDS. Transmission 
rate set to 36MB, transmit power default of 28mw. Our link was setup by 
Darren and Harry back in the day, so I'm pretty confident all is well on the 
roof, and our current "issue" is just WDS.

I'm assuming that increasing the transmit power will have no positive 
effect? We tried it about 2yrs ago and noticed no improvement, but that was 
down to channel interference.

If I increase the transmission rate higher than 36MB, and run speedtests on 
the final hop router (adslguide and speedtest.net) the average speed is 
lower than when set at 24MB. The 1st 2 routers in the chain get the full 
bandwidth (~9MB), so 36MB is the sweet spot at the moment.

This has proved that our current tranmission rate is stable at 36MB but 
higher isn't 100% reliable which might be the limit of the WRT54G v1.1 that 
we have (125mhz) with multiple PC's attached to each router. We currently 
have no interference or line of sight issues, hence why I'm thinking it's 
the router performance.

Now, what I was thinking was trying 3x Linksys WRT54GS for the speedboost 
and DD-WRT firmware.

Would this give me a more reliable transmission rate above 36MB due to the 
increased processor speed etc? Or more importantly, will I see less of the 
WDS bandwidth drop - ie get more bandwidth due to the increased overall 
wireless transmission rate?

We're going to try DD-WRT in the next few weeks both in WDS and 
Client-AP-Client mode to see if there is any improvement over our current 
firmware, and to see if the client/AP mode is anymore reliable than it was 
in previous 3rd party firmwares.

And the next question. Does anyone have any spare Linksys WRT54GS that I 
could borrow (2 in total as I've already got a spare), or even anyone 
selling any cheap? Need to be serial CGN0 to CGN6.

Look forward to your feedback
Regards
Andy :)