LAN Device to WiFi Bottleneck

[Javier_11]

Hi everyone
id like to consider myself a BIT tech savy but i need the great minds of those that are way more knowledgeable then i am to give their input on this, as i am not sure if there is anything i can do to improve my home network situation

I Have some devices here that connect to each other via a Home Network

Desktop:
Running Windows 10 w/ Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller 10/100/1000 Mbps NIC
connected to router Via LAN cable Cat5e

Router:
Netgear AC1750 R6400-100NAS
5ghz network

Android Device #1-5
Dual-band, dual-antenna Wi-Fi (MIMO) supports 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi networks
NO ETHERNET PORT


so anyways, story is Desktop one Transfers a single Zip file compressed to each of the 5 android devices around the house at the same time. some times it ends up being more then 5 devices. when i do the speed drops way low, obviously right? Dekstop is physically connected to the LAN port of the Router, the router then sends the file over WiFi 5ghz network. the devices are only maybe 3 feet away from the router

i want to improve on the speed when doing this but i have no idea where to begin. im not looking to go faster im just looking to have that extra "highway lane" that allows the data to transfer without dragging down the speeds like crazy? what can i do?

 

[Ralston18]

Unfortunately, probably not much.

There is only so much bandwidth and performance will be only as fast as the slowest "bottleneck".

You may be able to try other channels to minimize interference but that would become an ongoing, continuing effort as the surrounding wireless environment changes.

Minimizing background processes on the desktop might help - again probably minimal.

I would strive for a reliable transfer that does not always require "resends" etc. due to problems with wireless errors. Slower may just be better sometimes when you sum it all up.

 

[bill001g]

You are pretty much limited that wireless is a shared half duplex connection. You technically are not sending the file to the five devices at the same time you are sending 5 copies of the data sequentially. So it directly cuts you speed by 1/5 but that is best case. The end devices are responding to each packet which in many cases will actually cause interference with the main data feed because they can not always hear each other. This increases the overall time because now you have data retransmissions. Now this is at the radio level it does not even consider that you are likely using TCP and a applications level system that sends their own acknowledgement messages increasing this competing traffic.

There is no easy solution for this. You would think you could just send out 1 copy of the data and all the end devices could get it. The problem is the encryption since each device uses different session encryption keys.

Now if you dig around you will find there are special wireless features that use a common key for broadcast/multicast traffic. In theory at least you could use one of the file transfer programs that use this method. The problems is data loss. It is much harder to get data re transmitted in this type of design so they work best on ethernet type of installs where the loss is close to 0. This was discussed much more frequently when the transfer speeds were 100m now that they are 1g and higher there is not a lot of interest. Not sure how well it would perform in a wireless installation where you experience more packet loss. The overhead of having to request the lost data from each machine which can be different may outweigh sending copies to each machine individually.