Thinkpads Forum

Hey all,i had a wrt54g with speed boost router.It just died,so i went to best buy & after looking I decided to pick up a Wireless-N broadband router WRT160N.i have a 2673-ddu t60p laptop.the wireless n does work since has the option for g since my card can only be a g.Was wondering if i got a network card(Dual-Band Wireless-N Notebook Adapter(WPC600N)).would my speed be faster than 54mbps with the card?Is it worth it.thanks

If you do a lot of large file xfers on your home LAN, then yes it would be worth it. If you mainly surf the net, then no it is not..

oh ok thanks harryc.so surfing the net wont be much of a difference.only if im downloading files & stuff.

Not really, look at it this way. Optimally the bandwidth on an 802.11g card is 54Mbps, but it really is something less than that normally. Lets say that you have the fastest Internet connection in New Jersey, and lets say it's Verizon FIOS. Verison FIOS tops out at 30 Mbps down, 5 Mbps up at the consumer level. So, you can easily see that your wireless adapter can transfer data faster than even the fastest FIOS connection, and while connected to it the FIOS connection is the bottleneck. Now lets think about wireless N. Minimally it's bandwidth is 108Mbps (using MIMO up to 300Mbps), and that is 3 to 10 times faster than FIOS. If you have something like 3Mbps DSL at home (I do), then the discussion of wireless N starts to get really silly.

Harryc wrote:Not really, look at it this way. Optimally the bandwidth on an 802.11g card is 54Mbps, but it really is something less than that normally.

Actual data throughput is a lot less, due to 802.11 protocol overheads!

Harryc wrote:Lets say that you have the fastest Internet connection in New Jersey, and lets say it's Verizon FIOS. Verison FIOS tops out at 30 Mbps down, 5 Mbps up at the consumer level. So, you can easily see that your wireless adapter can transfer data faster than even the fastest FIOS connection

Very defintely not for an 802.11g WiFi link!

I have a 30Mbps/1Mbps HFC DOCSIS 2 connection and there is no way that an 802.11g WiFi connection can come anywhere close to keeping up with the data that is available from my ISP, when using a download manager to aggregate connection paths through the public Internet.

Under the optimal conditions, on an uncontested channel, a 802.11g link will achieve a maximum real throughput of about 18Mbps, and most real world 802.11g links are running very significantly below optimal conditions, and on contested channels!

Harryc wrote:Now lets think about wireless N. Minimally it's bandwidth is 108Mbps (using MIMO up to 300Mbps), and that is 3 to 10 times faster than FIOS.

No.

The actual usable data throughput on a FIOS, HFC, ADSL2+ (etc) wired connection is a MUCH higher percentage of the raw link speed that it is on an 802.11 WiFi connection. You can't realisticaly do a direct comparision of the achievable real data througputs between wired and WiFi based on the raw link speeds!

Cheers,

Bill B.

Well, you've done a spiffy job of correcting my math Bill, good for you. We still haven't answered the OPs question, but we're making progress at least.