Just moved into a new apartment and new router. Questions regarding WPA, WEP, etc...

[pg22]

Hello!

My girlfriend and I have moved into a new apartment and I finally opened the free Netgear WGR614 v5 I got with my Dell 700m. Anyway, I've set it up, my Internet connection is blazing (over 6mpbs/800kps). But I live in a college environment, which means at any one given time there are something like 8 wireless connections, and no one is going to snag my speed

So I've done a little reading on the router's security, and it has 'WPA-PSK' which seems to be better than then WEP, which I have used in the past. My question is this:

If I use WPA, will I be reducing my wireless speed, and if so, would it be significantly? Further, is it the speed at which I would browse the Internet, or simply file transferring speed?

Sorry for all the questions, but thanks in advance for the help!

Edit:

One other question. In the router settings, it says this:

Key Lifetime

This setting determines how often the encyption key is changed. Shorter periods provide greater security, but adversely affect performance. If desired, you can change the default value.

Default is 60 mins, so should I increase it, if so, how much?

 

[rustynails]

Look your getting of 6megs down, i hardly think encryptions are going to make a noticable difference. There is some over head, but how it is measured i have no idea. Your speed will more than likely fluctuate with quality of your wirless link rather than the wep you chose.

The only thing i setup is mac filtering, wep 128 and turn off my ssid. As i have mentioned before, all wireless is hack-able.

~n

 

[Fardringle]

Yes, enabling security can slow down the speed that data transfers across the network since the system needs to use a small portion of the available bandwidth to send the encryption information. However, on most networks it is a small enough portion to not be noticeable.

Also, since your router uses the "G" wireless technology, its available bandwidth is FAR greater than even the absolute maximum you might see with your 6mbps Internet connection, so I would be surprised if you were to see any difference at all with security enabled. The one disclaimer to this depends on whether your router (and your computer) are fast enough to process the encryption without any performance hit. I highly doubt that your laptop would have any problem with this at all, but I'm not familiar with your router so I can't say anything definite about it. The easiest way to find out is to turn it on and see what happens.

In answer to your last question, unless you are worried about people constantly trying to hack in to your network (possible on a college campus, but it's up to you to decide) I would just leave the Key Lifetime setting at default. The note about shorter periods affecting performance refers more to changing the key every few minutes. This is very secure since even if someone hacks your key, there will be a new one on the network in a few minutes and they'll have to try to hack it again. The performance hit comes from the need for your PC and router to be continually sending the new key information back and forth, and even at a very short duration, the affect on network performance is usually very small, particularly if you aren't coming anywhere near to using the full capacity of the network (you won't if you only use it for the Internet). 60 minute life on the key means that this key passing only happens once per hour and you won't see any effects at all on your network unless the router can't process the changes fast enough, and if this is the case, it will be slow for everything, so processing a new key won't really make any difference anyway... 😉 Again, the only way to know for sure is to turn it on and see what happens.

The best thing you can do to ensure speed and stability on your wireless network, whether encrypted or not, is to use a program like NetStumbler to find a channel that is not being used, and set your router to use that channel so that you won't get any interference from other wireless routers in the area.