Do you remember a simpler world? A world where if we wanted things to communicate, we strung up a wire. Whether as a child, string and tin cans, or extending your telephone, installing a TV aerial. Indeed, the Victorians conquered much of the world by laying wires in straight lines. Our recent history is largely built on taking something from point A and controlling its exact path to point B. It goes where we tell it to. Wires. Controlled and orderly. The British way.
Fast forward to 2012 and we have this abomination that is wireless. It goes wherever it wants (usually not very far) and we have to stick things in places where we hope the signal will connect. We are no longer in control, instead dictated to by an invisible bunch of acronyms. The master is now the slave.
This is of course a very long winded and not very helpful post to essentially ask for advice / help. Which also means this is probably miss-post in terms of forum.
I have a dual band Netgear 802.11ac wireless router. Fifteen feet away, in line of sight and at the same height, I have a dual band Netgear 802.11n wireless extender. Attached to the extenders 10/100 ethernet ports using 2-3m CAT6 UTP are a PC (mythtv), TV and BluRay player.
Upstairs, a mere 4 meters from the router downstairs, is my desktop PC using a PCIE-1 Asus dual band 802.11n wireless NIC.
The router and extender are connected on 5GHz at 270Mbps.
The NIC and router are connected on 5GHz at 160Mbps.
With my old setup, the PC went to a router as did the mythtv box, on CAT5e UTP via 10/100 ethernet. Copying files via Samba share achieved 9 meg a second, or roughly 72Mbps.
Pinging the router was around 1-3ms
So now, I'm getting 160Mbps and router pings of 0.7-1.2ms
Not too bad considering I didn't have to drill through forests of floor boards and skirting.
So I should be getting a transfer of around 15+ meg a second, right???
Well, it's 4. Yes, I'm getting 4 meg a second. What the hell is going on? I've updated all the firmware. I've tried connecting the desktop PC at 2.5GHz and 5GHz, at 2.5GHz the speed drops to 3 meg/second
I've tried connecting to either the router or the extender. I tried running the extender in "Fast Lane" where it connects at 2GHz to outside devices and 5GHz to the router. Tried turning off my mobile, microwave and cordless phone.
The best I achieved was 5.5 meg a second. The theoretical speed of this is 37 meg a second.
Have I cocked up by buying an extender? If I connect the PC to the extender to send a file to MythTV (which is attached to the extender), does the extender send it to the router first, to then pass it back to the extender. I don't know enough and assumed that if connected to the extender, the data would not travel via the router. Even if it did, its still very poor throughput considering the connected speed.
I got annoyed and wiggled the aerial at the back of the desktop PC about 1 inch. I'm now connected stably at 215Mbps (from 160Mbps) and I'm getting....... 3.5 meg a second... ggrrrrrrr.
Where are the other 15-20 meg/sec?

PS. I'm pleased that the Asus pce-n53 works with Linux, albeit having to compile drivers they supply, but it was simple.