Hi Everyone

I am having a few problems with a network setup that I have. I am on a network
with 15 other students, this network provides us with broadband(I will call this student-network).

I have a seperate network in my room ( I shall call this linux-network )of 3 linux machines , 1 Ubuntu , 2 x Mandrake 10.0. One of the Mandrake machines has a 802.11g wireless card and is the gateway to the student-network

My main concern is the speed of the student-network. When I ping one my machines on the linux-network I get ping times of less than 1ms , where as pinging the router on the student-network has ping times of more than 100ms and sometimes drops to 12ms but maily
stays above 100ms

Does anybody have any ideas on why it is SOOOOO slow. If there are any ways of speeding
up the networks, PLEEEASE let me know.

p.s We have 4MB/s downstream on our broadband service, yet I am not able to get download
speeds of above 50Kb/s very rarely 100kb/s

p.s.s everybody else on student-net are running XP and have wireless cards

p.s.s.s I think that we have too many wireless users on whats meant to be a 4 port hub. But that
doesnt really make much sense to me.

Are you using a hub? If so, replace it with a switch. A hub shares the total bandwidth between all the ports. So if you are running a 100mb network and have an 8 port hub, each system only has 12.5mb bandwidth available. That, and you also have the overhead created by data being broadcast on all ports of the hub. A switch will allow each port to take full advantage of the available bandwidth. Wireless shouldn't have that large of an effect on the overall bandwidth.

Another thing is if someone is running a P2P program or have a bittorrent going it can easily saturate a simple network.

We are using a NETGEAR DG834 router. We are all wireless, according to you ,
that should be a problem.

Is there anything I can do at the router level to speed things up , or
limit bandwidth in anyway. The reason that I am asking this is that our Broadband service is quite fast,but
I am experiencing dialup like speeds at my end.

Is it reasonable of to expect 100+k/s downloads ?

Is there anyway of restricting bandwidth, or sharing it evenly amongst the wireless users ?