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802.11b vs 802.11g

A

anuraagm

Junior Member
Hi,
I have a cable internet connection at home and we were planning to upgrade from 802.11b to g. However me and my roommate are not sure whether there is any point in upgrading to 802.11g. I know that the latter is faster. My question is whether a "typical" cable-internet connection is fast enough to merit an 802.11g setup.

Also, is the download speed different from the connection speed.

thanks
 
If you search here you may find quite a few threads on this subject where people have made various observations about the pros and cons of 802.11b vs 802.g.

Since your total cable Internet connection throughput is probably an order of magnitude slower than g, and maxes out at about a third of the theoretical maximum for b, then you shouldn't see any difference between b and g in browsing / downloading / uploading speeds. However, for local file transfers between machines on the same wireless LAN you would see that g is MUCH more satisfactory than b.

Frankly, I think the most important reason for most people to get g is that it should support WPA. If the wireless router and adapters you get support WPA (not all g equipment does, though it should) then the use of pre-shared TKIP or AES keys for encryption is better protection from interlopers using your network. Coupling WPA with the ability of the router to refuse connection to MAC addresses other than those for the specific machines you want to use on the network should help provide pretty decent security for your network, and should help you keep others from leeching your bandwidth.
 
Since 802.11b runs at 11Mb/sec max, and you probably average a true speed of 5mb+/sec, I would say that you won't notice much difference on the Internet by upgrading to 802.11g, but the performance increase on your LAN would be awesome.

For me, personally, I am gonna wait until THIS comes down a bit in price and Verison offers FOIS in my area.

If you upgrade, I highly recommend those, but again, I doubt that there's any need if ALL you're looking for is an increase in Internet performance.

 
yea, the chance of your internet being even close to b's 11mbit is slim. G would only be good if you guys liked to stream music/videos and copy files around eachothers computers.
 
Well, as hinted at already, your best case scenario for your .11b WLAN is about 5 Mb. You start adding obstructions in the path and you could be down to 2 or 3 Mb fairly quickly. It used to be that this was plenty but more and more providers are offering packages that would gobble up that bandwidth in a hurry and beg for more so the question is. Have you benched your wireless network throughput? If so, then how much do you have to play with? How about your internet connection. What's your real world speed? So your question can really only be answered by you is my point. It's pretty simple mathematics, and the knowledge, albeit is very basic, to test your available throughput. Both on your internet connection and your WLAN.
 
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