bit of an exaggeration, but I know what you mean. We've run 54M for ~500m with appropriate antennae.

Hi Ronnie, as I said earlier, if your internet connection is less than 11 meg then there is no need to upgrade. The 11b factor means that the wireless router is capable of putting wireless speeds through of up to 11meg. As you do not purchase an 11 meg speed from your ISP - your speed is only 2 Meg - an 11b wireless connection is more than adequate.

Your "g" laptop is backwards compatible, so will recognise that your router is "b". Even if you upgraded your router to the G client, you would not see any speed increase since your action internet connection downstream speed is 2 meg, so that is the speed you will get regardless of device.

Where you do benefit from 54meg (11g) as opposed to 11 meg,(11b) is if you are transferring any files or folders to another networked computer - obvioulsy the 11g will transfer them faster, but that is nothing to do with the internet

You will need to set up your laptop to access your router wirelessly. To do this you will need to ensure that wireless is turned on in your router page. Follow the instructions you got with the netgear, and you should be able to do it. If you are connecting wired and wirelessly via the laptop, you will need to turn off the wireless access on your laptop when the wire is in to prevent complications.

TBH, you are better just to use it wirelessly, because if you are near the router so that you are using a wire, why not just use it wirelessly? It can cause problems having to keep disabling wireless and then turning it back on.

Edited by deleted (Tue 12-Sep-06 18:43:54)

Kyomii, I think you're a little optimistic with your assessment of wifi throughput. As I understand it, the rated speed is the total in both directions, so you're down to 5.5 Mbps each way. Then there are overheads, and on top of all that, the bandwidth is shared between all the wifi-attached machines. My own 11b stuff rarely gets much above 3 Mbps throughput. However, that's more than enough to service my BB.

On the plus side, internet traffic is by nature mostly "bursty", so in practice several users can share an 11b connection without being too aware of the others. However, a single "greedy" user who wants to dp p2p or streaming will slow it down dramatically.

And whilst 3 Mbps may be adequate to cope with surfing and emailing, bear in mind that, for instance, a 700 MB CD will take about 31 minutes to transfer at 3 Mbps - you won't want to be moving large files about on such a network.

Thank you Kyomii and Xris. It seems to me that I have completely misunderstood what a Laptop with a g wireless as against b, is all about. As mentioned previouslly my main reason for getting it was beacuse there are times I have to connect to the internet to use the webcam where I have no cable connection to use. I am not convinced that the general public understand this as I clearly did not, it seems as though it is a good selling point but not very well understood. You only have to read about wireless speed and it is all about getting the 54 speed and even faster, if as you point out it has no benefit as far as internet is concerned there seems very little if anything to gain, except as you say between two computers.

So from what you have said, the speed of wireless connection is NO SLOWER than a cable connection? This really is something new to me as I have Always certailnly understood that it is. But I can see your point about if using a 2Meg speed and that is the limit, it does not matter if it is cable or wireless the speed can still be the same? However, I guess the advantage of cable over wireless is you get a better quality connection with not so much lost on the way? For many years I was involved with Video Editing and I well recall that it was drumbed into us that a Wireless connection is much slower than cable!!

I have certainly learnt a great deal from this posting and thank you all. I hope the subject is continued as I always want to learn more about what I am working with. It does now seem to me that I had just as well stay with what I have at least for the present. If I change providers ie say Orange to BT so I can get at least 6Meg they will provide free the equipment which is all g wireless, time will tell!!

All the best, ronnieG

By and large, I'd agree with kyomii that the wireless speed isn't too important. Or it hasn't been but now we have adslmax (up to 8 Mbps) and ADSL 2+ (24 Mbps), these can both outperform 11b (on the face of it, 11 Mbps is faster than 8 Mbps, but I wanted to point out that in practice you don't get all of that notional 11 Mbps with 11b wifi).

It comes down to what you want to do with your network Some users of this forum are putting in gigabit Ethernet which supports, yes, 1000 Mbps. This is important only if you are routinely moving large files, or have a lot of traffic. Most of us cannot justify it.

I currently have 4 visitors sharing a 54g router connection and they're all quite happy. At least one of the adapters in use is only 11b, so I'm not actually sure whether the wlan is running at "54g" or "11b" speeds. But everyone's happy, so I don't care too much.

In my case. my broadband is 1.5 Mbps, so even the 3 Mbps that 11b manages would be more than enough (in most cases) to keep up with it. If you have anything above 2 Mbps adsl, then you probably need 54g wireless kit to ensure that your internal links can comfortably outpace the BB data. If you have adsl 2+, then 54g or above (mimo, 108 Mbps) is essential.

Apart from speed (I don't get my full line speed through my 11b wireless, about 3meg rather than 4.5meg) but the biggest difference is security 'b' generally only has WEP encryption whereas 'g' has WPA or more and is generally considered more secure.

Hi Ronnie

Sorry, paying work meant I didn't check back as soon as intended.

To clear your questions;
On your 2Mbit DSL connection, Internet performance will be the same regardless of connection between router and computer. Lan cable, and wireless b or g are all significantly faster than the connection to outside world so any one of them could saturate the DSL capacity.

Wireless G should give better performance than B (between your computers). Any PC - PC link will run at the speed of its slowest component, just as you can only drive at the speed of the car in front. In other words, if you upgrade the link (b to g, or wireless to cable) you should see a speed increase for transfers between computers around your home.

As at least one other poster has pointed out, you should also gain the benefit of WAP security rather than WEP (which is easy to crack). THis is actually important to you even if you think nobody is interested in your data, the key point is you won't risk providing free internet access to half the kids in the street.

You can use your laptop configured for both wired and wireless connections. I normally leave mine like this, I run on wirelss at home and around the office, and plugin a cable if I need to copy huge volumes to other computers on the network (this usually means gigabytes rather than megabytes).

Unfortunately this is unlikely to help your webcam if its working out over internet because the DSL link is the likely bottleneck and still runs the same speed. The only help I can suggest here is to compare existinf wireless (11Mbit) and wired (100Mbit) connections to router with webcam, and prove by experiment whetther the wireless is pulling it down. If there's no difference you need to check settings, memory available, processor speeds, and maybe consider more efficient software. If you have 2 webcams you could also duplicate the test within your lan, to show how much impact is due to the slower intyernet connection.

--
Paul