Just signed up to BT Infinity and I’ve been told that I should expect speed of about 30.9 Mbps. At that speed would i benefit from connecting the computer via an Ethernet cable to the router rather than using 802.11n wireless?

Cheers

No. Even 802.11g does 54Mbps

excellent… thank you.

🙂

The 54Mb/s on 802.11g is a marketing number.

It’s the bitrate of the overall over-the-air protocol, including all the headers, preamble, postamble, and general faffing around involved in sending a packet out.

You’ll never actually see anymore than about 23Mbit/s (TCP) of actual payload.

Likewise, in reality he’ll never get the quoted 30.9 Mbps out of his net connection

The availability checkers seem to be conservative for FTTC speeds.

My FTTC is activated on Tuesday with an expected speed of 16.6Mbps down / 7.9Mbps up.

Maximum speed does not always equal maximum reliable speed.

Not sure what the speed of 802.11g has to do with it. 802.11n standard allows for the fastest wireless speeds at the moment. It uses MMO to send multiple streams at once. I have seen speed quoted of up to 200mbs. But….. I did some testing on n devices earlier this year and in the “real” world we normally didn’t get over 100mbs when the router and laptop were next to each other. Also note it was very device depedant. You will see haigher speeds with n, but I find its not a stable as g (IMO).

I’ve worked in Product Development of wirless technologyfor a pretty long time and have had “a lot” of devices on test at home using a,b,g and n. Had them connected to PCs, laptops, games consoles, smart phones and so on. Personnely I have always found that other than surfing the net (such as streaming or gameing) the connection will always let you down in some way, be it speed, latencey or connection stability.

At home I have all my “static” static devices connected via a GigE wired network and just wireless for the roaming devices (although I have a ethernet cable next to the sofa when I’m sitting on my arse watching tv and working).