Questions about wireless

I have just moved to using wireless on my 6 wk old laptop and have it set to WPA2 for security, channel selection is automatic, but I realised my laptop does b/g and the new bt homehub I got does b/g/draft-N does that matter ??

Can anyone point me at any good info on using wireless and whats best settings to use on it at all ??

I've never used wireless before this laptop and want to get my head around it now that I am using it as the main connection from the laptop (ethernet is available if needed)

b/g will give you up to about 20 mbits/s of data throughput which will cover most ADSL connections. If you do a lot of network data stuff a draft-N dongle might be worth it, but you'll only gain 80-100% on speed.

According to the router actual data transfer is 36 Mbps and when clicking on the network icon on the toolbar it states connected at 54Mbps - what do the figures mean ??

Sorry for dumb questions but I cant get my head round the numbers

I know the data transfer rate has increased since I got the new v2 homehub (the v1 hubs wireless was flakey) and the v2 is more stable but I dont know how or why

the 54M will be the "over the air" symbol rate, which after overheads carries about 20Mbits/s of useful data.

I don't know why the router would be indicating 36M or indeed any speed, what does it say precisely ?

It reports the actual data transfer speed ???

At present it says

In reply to:

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Actual data transfer speed 54 Mbps

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But earlier it was

In reply to:

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Actual data transfer speed 36 Mbps

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sounds like it's telling you the connection speed to the client device.

Too much of a coincidence that it reports two 802.11g link speeds (36, 54) rather than something like 37.285 so it isn't a measure of the data actually flowing (which is more likely to be 20 or less).

But it varies at other times - it isnt always one of them it can be anything from 14Mbps upto 54Mbps, they were just the two I spotted yesterday

And if I am actually doing something or downloading the speeds it reports vary more !!

there are lots of speeds that 802.11g can run at - from memory they include 12, 18, 24, 36, 48 and 54M but there might be others.

If you see an integer value I think it's the connect speed, not the data throughput.

My wireless claims to support 1, 2, 5.5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48 and 54 Mbits/s.