Anyone Gone Wireless N?

I went with Dlink DIR-655 and the associated Dlink adapter. I don't think the speed is all that much greater, and the router needs to be reset occasionally where I didn't have to do that with the old one. Hopefully newer firmware will address that problem. I hoped it would help me transfer large files to my living room machine but it's still not nearly what I need. File transfers don't complete before the single drops out so they don't complete. Dlink support wasn't any help although we changed a number of settings. I'm just going to get a 6 Gb thumb drive as soon as the price drops.

 

I couldn't punch a decent wireless signal through the complex set of obstacles in my mom's house using G. The signal was simply too weak. N easily solved that problem.

It works fine for her. My notebook likes it too. Not sure of the speed, but there certainly hasn't been any reason whatsoever to complain.

Linksys (the one with the funky third antenna) is the router I used for that along with a USB adapter on her rather old non-wireless computer.
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Thats just D-Link for you. They are complete junk. You'll always have to reset them every day.

I've seen and researched N, but I dont have it in my house. I'm not going to until IEEE makes it a standard. Because until then, any (Pre)N hardware may become inoperable in a few months. It happened to (Pre)G. IEEE changed the specs of G right before they put it out, making all (Pre)G hardware trash. IEEE wont do it for probably another year or so, but until then, my internet connection is only 12mbps, lan is only 100megs, MIMO G is 108, so that works for me. I'll definatly be getting it though.

 

This thread reminded me of this funny bit by David Pogue.

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?i=15455526&id=210818527

 

The text version of that story (along with a video that might actually play) can be found at the NY Times.

The point of all of it really reinforces what slair says, I think. Until there's a standard, you just can't be sure of compatibility and that devices will play nicely together.

 

We have a wireless N bridge into our home network that up & downloads over 2megs per second and the bridge keeps up with it easily.

 

But those data rates are well within what G should be able to give you (i.e. 54 Mbit/s ~ 6 MBytes/s). One of Pogue's points back in April (when he wrote the NY Times article) was that the (Pre)N routers were giving data rates well below what they should be able to give. I don't know if this has been fixed yet, but it's interesting to consider.

Another thing to realize is that almost no one is actually going to be able to take advantage of those data rates to the "outside world." In other words, if you have a wireless router capable of 300 Mbit/sec and you have a 12 Mbit/sec connection (i.e. pretty much the top end of cable connections), it's obvious where the bottleneck is going to be; the N technology is pretty much only useful at this point if you're going to be transferring files between your computers in your house (i.e. NOT for the connection to the outside world).

 

I'm staying away until they finalize the spec. I really don't see the need for more range or higher speed. I really don't see how N gets longer range when using the same frequency as b/g. Maybe it transmits at a higher power level or they have a higher gain antenna? I really have not looked into that part. As far as speed goes it wont make your internet any faster. It will just make transferring files form one PC to the next faster.

I just upgraded my Linksys WAP11 802.11b access point ( installed hacked dlink firmware ) to a Linksys WRT54GL 802.11b/g and upgraded it to the Tomato firmware yesterday . The only reason that I upgraded was because I wanted a little faster large file transfer speeds to my Prius and laptop computers. If I need to extend the range the Tomato firmware will allow for more transmit power and if needed I can add some higher gain antenna.

If you want N I would personally wait until the standard is finalized so you wont have any hardware that will not work with each other.

 

Welcome to the world of computer specs!

The 54 Mbit/s rate is the maximum raw data rate of the radio.

As far as I know WiFi radios are half-duplex. Which means that they don't transmit and receive at the same time. So the sustained throughput is going to be much less. The latencies of radio implementations are typically much higher than a wired connection. This also kills throughput compared to a wired link.

 

I had D-Link DSL G604T and it was crap!
I had to reset it several times a day.
I installed a Nettcom modem and wireless router about a month ago and haven't touched it since.
As long as the modem has been working the wireless hasn't been a problem. I can use my laptop in the back of my back yard about 30 metres from the router and through about 3/4 of my house with excelent signal strength. Never had an issue with speed, I have used skype along side yahoo video conferencing with no issues over wifi. My son downloads videos with no issues on the other desktop.

PC to PC over the wifi is faster than the network where I work.

 

True. Overhead can (and does!) reduce the throughput. However, the point of my post is still valid; the maximum throughput of an 802.11g connection is so much higher than 2 MB/s that the hit that it takes from overhead doesn't make any real difference. Pogue's point was that many of the (Pre)n routers were way below where they should be, even including overhead.

I don't know about the duplex-icities of WiFi; I have no reason to doubt that you're right. However, this isn't a big deal for the average home user. Most of the traffic for a typical home user is downstream, anyway, which is why most people don't care that their DSL connections are asymmetric.

 

I was expecting Pogue to say "And the answer is....get an Apple Airport Extreme base station and a MacBook Pro. Problem solved."