Quick Question: You lucky guys' ACTUAL transfer rates over wireless LANS? thanks a ton!

[SammyBoy]

Hey guys. My dad is concidering a wireless LAN at his office, cuz he has seen the light and wants to catch the tail end of the tech craze.
Unfortunately, he read an industry magazine article about how they are really convenient, but up to 10 times slower for sending data, and he would have to send a bunch of pictures ranging from 100k-3megs all across the network, and they said it could take like 20-40 seconds, and at 11mbps, i dont really get how a 3 MB file could take 40 seconds or a minute. (ya ya i know its not using all of that bandwidth)

my question is, what speeds can he hope to actually attain? Thanks a ton guys, i'll owe you one

-Sam

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

if the comps are close, then expect from 500-1000 kb per second transfers. I average 300-400 k transfers, but my computers are far from each other. For his office, i suggest he NOT go wireless. It's not worth the money and your transfers will suffer.

 

[SammyBoy]

thanks man.

Ive got a few minutes so I will say what it will be used for. He works at a dental office, and for marketting and records he wants to get a really nice intra-oral camera, so he can take pictures of gross stuff people cant see, blow em up, and show em that their brain is showing or something 🙂

He was concidering duron rigs for the scheduling and oporatory computers, and 1 laptop with firewire connectivity to the camera that went around and took all the pics. the convenience of just grabbing the camera and the lappy and going to any of the 4 chairs in the office may be worth the speed difference, and the prices are getting lower and may actually be cheaper than running cat5 through the walls of a big office, and it adds more expansion later than a 4 or 8 port wired router.

any other comments?

thanks

 

[pm]

I have used a Lucent Orinocco and an Intel 2011 set up and both have transferred at approx. 8-9Mb/s at a range of over 100ft. It starts to fall off after that, but I achieved close to the rated speed of both even when I was several floors above the basestation.

Intel has released it's 54Mb (about 1/2 slower than 100Mb Ethernet) wireless 802.11a wireless LAN products (they are the only ones so far, I believe). They are not that much more than the 11Mb wireless setups. Datasheet for the product (in PDF) is here.