Slow Wireless? Always says "Speed: 11.0 Mbps " Is

[Delmarco]

Before I was using my Toshiba Satellite with a wireless Proximo Orinico a/b/g gold card and my speed was always 56Mbps or higher.

I've beenwith my ne thinkpad for about a week and I've logged on wirelessly all the time where ever I go and I realized that the speed is always 11.0Mbps. Even though the connection doesn't feel any slower than the Toshiba/Orinoco card or when I'm on a DSL landline computer at school.

I'm sure the speed is not 11.0Mbps....
where can the problem be? or am I misinterpreting something?

[smugiri]

Unless you upgraded your card, your hardware, the ThinkPad T41 2379-DJU in your signature comes with a 802.11b card according to IBM which tops out at 11Mbps.

[Delmarco]

Unless you upgraded your card, your hardware, the ThinkPad T41 2379-DJU in your signature comes with a 802.11b card according to IBM which tops out at 11Mbps.

okay...I never upgraded the card.

Is 11.0 mbps usually considered slow?
It sounds slow to me, since my Proximo Orinoco a/b/g Gold card
was at least 56.0 mbps on the slow days.

what is average for fast?

and what is average normal speeds?

Thanks Steve

[smugiri]

11MBps seems to be pretty much the standard for almost everything on the market right now since there are lots of 802.11a/b and 802.11b/g routers out there but not as many 802.11 g or 802.11a/b/g

You can consider yourself to be pretty much in the same boat with almost everyone else using a wireless connection to the internet.

Another consolation, if your network access is primarily for surfing the net then most internet connections over cable or DSL top out at about 7MBps which is less than the speed of your card (unless you are one of those luck people hooked up to a T3 or the internet backbone itself or something like that). This means the bottleneck will be the internet connection speed and not your card.

Flip side to this: speeds on wireless cards are usually best possible speeds and never indicate real world throughput which must always be less due to a bunch of factors including transmission overhead, total number of connections to the access point etc etc. This means that 802.11b cards typically do something like 5 to 7MBps data throughput in the real world.

Bottom line, at this point, 802.11b is just fine unless you have access to a great internet connection or use your machine for work/play on a network on which speeds higher than the normal of about 7MBps are available.