802.11b & 802.11g - Speed differences with broadband?

dcGT

Hi All,
I've just been looking into setting up a wireless system and have noticed considerable price differences between 802.11b and 802.11g hardware.

I was just wondering where you would notice (real world) speed differences between 802.11b (11kb/s) and 802.11g (54 kb/s) systems using a standard broadband connection? e.g. downloading/gaming etc.

Any info would be great,

Cheers,

DC.

Capt'n Midnight

802.11b is 11Mb/s which is probably a tad faster than your broadband.

if you want to go more than 300m then 802.11b is best and besides g will drop back to 11Mb if there is noise or a poor signal path - if it's very noisy both b and g will drop down to 5.5 / 2/ 1Mb/s - so g is only of benefit in ideal circumstances.

Stugots

DC, unless you're one of the lucky few on the fibre DSL trial, you won't notice any difference in speed with your internet access through either of these types of wireless router. You quoted the speeds incorrectly - it is 11 Mbps for b and 54 MBps (not kbps) for g. Both of these speeds are much faster than your typical eircom DSL line (512 kbps max) so the DSL line is the bottleneck, not the wireless connection.

If you buy a G router, it is backwards compatible with B access cards and I believe (hearsay) that the range is greater with B than G. I have a G router and set up a cheap B card in my laptop while waiting for upgrade to a G capable Centrino.

dcGT

Thanks for the replies lads. So basically, given my setup, there's no advantage to having the 'g' spec. hardware.

@Stugots - sorry, yes Mb/s is what meant

DC.

Rew

dcGT wrote:

Thanks for the replies lads. So basically, given my setup, there's no advantage to having the 'g' spec. hardware.

@Stugots - sorry, yes Mb/s is what meant

DC.

There is an advantage if you transfer data between PC's on the network via wireless.

seamus

Rew wrote:

There is an advantage if you transfer data between PC's on the network via wireless.

You're also future proofing yourself to a degree. I know personally, if I had bought 802.11b hardware, I'd probably find myself upgrading in a year to g, as I integrated more services into a home LAN, and upgraded my broadband connection.
Also wireless has a much lower throughput than conventional cabled comms. Wireless has to contend with interference, signal strength and other forms of overheads, so in reality, throughput (the amount of actual data that goes through) rates at around half of the actual speed. 802.11b typically has a throughput of 5.5Mbits (Around 600KB per second), whereas 802.11g does around 24Mbits (around 2.5MB/s). It won't be long, 5 years at most, before the b standard becomes completely obsolete, and considered a painfully slow way to transmit data.

Rew

seamus wrote:

It won't be long, 5 years at most, before the b standard becomes completely obsolete, and considered a painfully slow way to transmit data.

802.11n is due in the near future (next year or so) which will blow 11g out of it as well. Id spend the mony on 11g gear as the price diferance isnt much and all the 11g kit tends to have more features.

dcGT

Some good points there lads, thanks!
I've ordered the 11g spec

Cheers,

DC.