What's required to make wireless reliable?

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   While we've had wireless workign for 2-3 months it's never been as
reliable a connection as I'd like. We get lots of audio dropouts when
streaming ogg files, etc. I'm wondering what sort of signal strengths
are required to really keep it working? Here are a couple of scans
that are representative of what we see:

[root at dragonfly root]#  iwlist wlan0 scanning
Warning: Driver for device wlan0 has been compiled with version 17
of Wireless Extension, while this program is using version 16.
Some things may be broken...
 
wlan0     Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:09:5B:XX:YY:ZZ
                    ESSID:""
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11b
                    Mode:Managed
                    Frequency:2.462GHz
                    Quality:0/100  Signal level:-56 dBm  Noise level:-256 dBm
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rate:1Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:2Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:5.5Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:11Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:6Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:12Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:24Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:36Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:8.5Mb/s
                    Extra:bcn_int=100
                    Extra:atim=0

[root at dragonfly root]#  iwlist wlan0 scanning
Warning: Driver for device wlan0 has been compiled with version 17
of Wireless Extension, while this program is using version 16.
Some things may be broken...

wlan0     Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:09:5B:XX:YY:ZZ
                    ESSID:""
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11b
                    Mode:Managed
                    Frequency:2.462GHz
                    Quality:0/100  Signal level:-54 dBm  Noise level:-256 dBm
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rate:1Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:2Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:5.5Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:11Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:6Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:12Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:24Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:36Mb/s
                    Extra:bcn_int=100
                    Extra:atim=0
          Cell 02 - Address: 00:09:5B:XX:YY:ZZ
                    ESSID:""
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11b
                    Mode:Managed
                    Frequency:2.462GHz
                    Quality:0/100  Signal level:-71 dBm  Noise level:-256 dBm
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rate:1Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:2Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:5.5Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:11Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:6Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:12Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:24Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:36Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:47Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:32.5Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:37Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:32.5Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:37.5Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:3Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:53.5Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:60.5Mb/s
                    Extra:bcn_int=100
                    Extra:atim=0


For those of you using wireless what sort of signal strength do you
see for your connections and are those connections really reliable?
With these levels it generally takes 5 minutes for the PC to establish
a connection with the router in the morning and we get dropouts all
day long.

Thanks in advance,
Mark