Photosmart C7250 wireless 802.11b fails

Question

My new C7250 works well with USB and wired ethernet, but fails miserably (prints slowly, if at all) on my wireless 802.11b network.  All other devices work well on my wireless network.  I've spent many hours with HP and exhausted their first line support.  They supposedly have opened a case but I have heard nothing in a week.  Meanwhile, I took a network trace using WireShark and it shows a large number of retransmissions.  (I'm expert with application/network performance profiling.)  All you have to do is browse to http://192.168.1.xxx/ to test transmission -- don't even need to install drivers or printers to see the errors.  This problem appears to be with wireless support on the C7250.
Has anyone experienced problems or success with 802.11b on this device?  How about 802.11g?  I would be willing to upgrade my wireless if I knew that it would resolve the problem.
What does it take to escalate a probem with HP for resolution?

Answer 1

All 2004 and newer wireless HP Inkjet printers are compatible with 802.11g and 802.11b networks (otherwise we couldn't get 802.11g Wi-Fi certification).  Besides testing for interoperability, we test for a minimum wireless throughput at the TCP layer.
I'd like to see the internal connectivity report that you can generate by pressing the <setup> and <#> buttons simultaneously.  Scan the report to a memory card, copy it to your PC and post the image here.
It will tell me information about your wireless network and other networks in the area.
I have a couple of other questions:
Does the slow printing go away after a power cycling the printer and then does it return later?
Does the slow printing go away after a power cycling the wireless-router and then does it return later?
Are you seeing retransmissions of TCP, 802.3 (ethernet) frames or 802.11 frames?  I wasn't sure at what layer you are sniffing the data at?
What make and model 802.11b wireless-router are you using?
Do you have encryption enabled?  Does disabling encryption change the speed of printing?
How many wireless PC's (Macs?) to you have on your network?  Do they all exhibit slow printing?
Have you changed the default fragmentation settings of your wireless-router?
At home, I routinely get 1.5 Mbytes/sec transfer rates between my 802.11g wireless-routers and my HP printers and about 700 Kbytes/sec in 802.11b mode.
One other thing you can try is to go to the printers internal web page, browse over to the Networking, Wireless, Advanced page and enable the configuration "In an infrastructure network use 802.11b behavior".
Regards / Jim B
Regards / Jim B / Wireless Enthusiasts
( While I'm an embedded wireless systems engineer at work, on this forum I do not represent my former employer, Hewlett-Packard, or my current employer, Microsoft )
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