OT - USB Wireless Dongle

[DerbyBoy]

I have a wireless laptop connected via a Belkin Router to the Virgin Broadband. My Desktop PC is currently wired.

For the sake of a few quid I could get a wireless dongle and do away with the wire which goes up the side of the house, across the loft and down the bedroom wall.

I have noticed that two different speeds of dongle are offered for sale -

150 Mbps and 300 Mbps. In real terms will I see a difference in the performance of them. My Broadband is 10mbps. The desktop PC is running XP. I don't run games.

John

[Steve Walker]

- your data speed is limited by the slowest link in the chain, the ISP. Any wifi dongle that reliably connects with 2 bars or better will carry that.

[dennis]

If you only use it for internet buy the cheapest, the speed doesn't make much difference. That is the simple bit anyway.

If you did want the fast one you would need a compatible router as the high speed dongles need high speed routers to give the speed.

Be aware that wireless may not work if the walls are too thick or absorbent or many other things which are rare but do happen.

[DerbyBorn]

My router is a 300Mbps N . My house is a modern one and line of sight between Router and PC is through one ceiling/floor. About 30 feet.

[DerbyBorn]

.......apart from Broadband useage - will I notice any difference in sharing files between the computers?

[John Williamson]

It'll depend on your computers' HD speeds mostly, as they're usually the slowest link in the chain. I can't come close to saturating a 54Meg link between mine, but they *are* both laptops.

[polygonum]

>>> If you only use it for internet buy the cheapest, the speed doesn't make

Although the new AirDrop feature in Mac OSX Lion sounds as if it goes directly from one computer to another - not via a router. Would actually like to know if that is in any way throttled by a slow router?

[OG]

I don't have an answer about the different speeds, but I would expect them both to be box speeds only, and in the real world, the actual speeds will be much slower.

You can test whether a wireless connection will be slower than the current wired by putting the laptop next to the desktop PC and visiting

on both.

Run 3 tests on each and take the average.

I would expect the wired connection to be faster.

[Nick Leverton]

Wireless to wireless will be slower than wireless to wired or v.v as the packets have to go via the router twice so need double the bandwidth. In theory you'd get half the speed but IME it is much less than that, you need to throttle it down to 1/10 speed otherwise the wireless performance becomes appalling for interactive use as well. We found this in the office and I get it at home. I suspect it's due to buffering.

Usually the double-speed rate relies on having two free wireless channels to bond together. You said your router does 802.11n, I don't know if that is any better but I suspect not in this instance where the packets have to go two ways over the air. It should increase speed with interference from neighbouring wireless setups though, if you get an 802.11n dongle.

Nick

[dennis]

Yes. If you do that go for the 300N dongle.

[Andy Champ]

Depends. My PC at work (which is running 7200 RPM drives, but not in a RAID) is capable of delivering over 500mbit over our wired links when copying large files. If I am copying large files around here I will take the trouble to plug a cable into my laptop - it'll easily saturate the wireless link. On the other hand, external internet access is only about 2mbit, so it's only worth it when copying a _lot_ of data _inside_ my own network.

Andy

[Jake]

Last week, I had to convert a PC to wireless to free up a port on my ADSL router for a NAS device. I went for Netgear rather than Belkin but started with a 150 mbps version which I thought would be enough. Took it back next day and bought the 300 mbps version which is significantly better.Less than a tenner more. Worth it in my opinion.

Cheers Jake ============================================== Gardening at the dry end (east) of Swansea Bay in between reading anything by JRR Tolkien.

[Theo Markettos]

Unless you have a pressing need to remove the wire, I'd stick with it. Wires just work. Wireless has a habit of claiming it doesn't have signal, when it clearly should do, and having a hissy fit and asking for the wireless key when it knows it perfectly well. Doesn't happen very often, but it's annoying when it does.

Theo

[Mark]

+1

Always use a wire if you can. You can waste so much time trying to get wireless connections to work when they *should* but *don't*.