Chaining wireless equipment

[Tony Langdon]

> Hi gang,
> I've been playing with different kinds of wireless equipment and have 
> come up against something that may be a wireless problem or a general 
> routing one, but hopefully someone has seen something similar!
> 
> When I've established a link between two 802.11 devices, I usually 
> manage to transfer files between the two ends at around 300KB/s. 
> However, when I start chaining them together, the speeds drops off to 
> about 125KB for two and 50KB for three. If I test the speed between 
> two points, it's still 300KB, and spanning two of the three links is 
> still about 125KB.

Could this be because of mutual interference on the wireless links?  I
presume you're either running two links off the one wireless NIC, or using
two wireless NICs in the same box.

Either way, you have extra congestion on the RF channel.  For single NIC
setups, the issue is sharing the RF channel (hidden stations/channel access,
etc).  For multi-NIC relays, it will be mutual interference between the
NICs, and they will tend to interfere with each other, unless you can set
them to different channels within the ISM band. 

Don't quote this as gospel, just some possibilities.