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Thinking of moving from 100Mb to Gigabit Network...

stuman74

stuman74

Senior member
I currently have in my house a trusty Linksys WRT54G Router where I am wireless connecting to my PC and wife's laptop with 802.11g wireless adapters. Runs pretty good, but I want to be able to share files (mostly music and videos) between the two. The files all reside on my PC.

My first thought was to run an ethernet cable from the router to my PC to improve network speed. Going from wireless-G to 100Mb ethernet, what should I expect for an ACTUAL increase in speed?

My second though was to get a Wireless N router and a wireless N adapter for my PC (the wife's laptop would remain as wireless-G).

My third option is to get a gigabit wireless-N router (like that white D-link one with the 3 antennas that I've seen at Costco) and a gigabit NIC for my PC and run the cable between them. The wife's laptop again would remain wireless-G.

I know there is also a fourth option to get an N adapter for her laptop, but with the current wireless-G integrated, I think her laptop will remain as-is.


I guess the main feedback I am looking for is, which option is the best combination of speed and economy for what I am looking to do? Thanks!!!
 
Best option would be to plug a cable into the laptop that's connected to the switch in your router. If laptop isn't gigabit capable then getting a gigabit router won't be doing any good between the two machines. As to download speed, the broadband connection is easily handled by non gigabit wired network. If you had gigabit capability on both machines, then you could get an inexpensive gigabit switch, plut it into the router and then plug both machines into the switch for faster file transfer/share between the two machines.
 
A simple way to upgrade an existing network to gigabit is to add a gigabit switch. Connect the switch to the router, and all PCs to the switch. Then transfers between two gigabit-enabled PCs will have gigabit-speeds.

However, if the primary objective is to improve transfer speeds between the PCs and the laptop, that won't help you much as the transfer is limited by wireless G.
 
Correct, the wireless-G laptop would then become the limiting factor, but I am hoping that having the PC with all the files connected to the network via ethernet or wireless-N would still improve the speed since the flow is from PC-to-router-to-laptop, correct? I know it's only improving what goes into the router and not what's going out.
 
Also, is there a summary anywhere showing the typical transfer speeds of wireless-G, wireless-N, 100 and 1000 Mb connection speeds? Not the theoretical from the manufacturers. Thanks!
 
On any given network with little network traffic, you can expect about 60% (depending on other variables also, ie cabling, hdd speed, OS, +think of others...lol) actual data throughput, the other 40% accounts for overhead in the ethernet packets. This has been my experience using various FTP clients between my machines on a 100Mb network. IMEXP this does not include 1000Mb networks, after you reach a certain point it's my experience that the OS and computer hardware has much to do with it. I had the same throughput on a 100Mb and 1000Mb connections between two machines. 100Mb was enough for what I needed (transferring multimedia files) so after a couple days of messing around I left it alone.
 
There's pretty much no point going gigabit if you can't even do it between two points which count. So unless you have some other machines which will be wired and participate in file sharing, or you wire and upgrade the laptop for gigabit, you should forget the idea that upgrading to gigabit will give you a significant performance improvement, as you'd be bottlenecked by the wireless.

If your notebook has a free PC Card slot, you could cheaply upgrade it to gigabit capability. E.g. http://search.ebay.com/search/...rk+notebook&category0=

Then in addition to the wiring, you'd only need to add an inexpensive gigabit switch for about the best point to point performance possible. That PC card wouldn't give you the greatest possible performance, but it can significantly exceed 100 Mb/s wired.

Standard-g wireless does around 23 Mb/s sustained real throughput under ideal circumstances where distance, interference, obstruction effects are minimal and the implementation is good.

Wired 100 Mb/s often does around 90 Mb/s in practice.

Wired gigabit can do anywhere between say around 300 Mb/s to 950 Mb/s in practice for raw networking, but other factors come into play with file transfers such that 25-30 MB/s (200-240 Mb/s) is commonly observed for Windows file transfers.

Draft-n is subject to environmental and implementation effects as is standard-g. Approaching 100 Mb/s actual throughput under ideal conditions would be about the best you could hope for, but such rates would not be commonly encountered.
 
Originally posted by: stuman74
Correct, the wireless-G laptop would then become the limiting factor, but I am hoping that having the PC with all the files connected to the network via ethernet or wireless-N would still improve the speed since the flow is from PC-to-router-to-laptop, correct? I know it's only improving what goes into the router and not what's going out.
Click to expand...

http://www.ezlan.net/net_speed.html
 
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