[iJed]

According to this http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0...37&tid=193 /. story the 802.11g standard has had its speed dropped to between 10 and 20 megabits! It will be interesting to see if Apple adopts the standard 802.11g or continues with the pre-standard 54 megabit version.

[tiborg]

I usually get about 5Mbps with regular 11Mbps Airport, do people with Airport Extreme consistantly get around 54Mbps or closer to 25Mbps?

[MaxPower2k3]

Originally posted by tiborg:
I usually get about 5Mbps with regular 11Mbps Airport, do people with Airport Extreme consistantly get around 54Mbps or closer to 25Mbps?

i usually get around 8mbps on my pb 12"

[RMXO]

Originally posted by tiborg:
I usually get about 5Mbps with regular 11Mbps Airport, do people with Airport Extreme consistantly get around 54Mbps or closer to 25Mbps?

daym 5mb is actually pretty good for 80211b. i only get 1-2mb max if im lucky. i heard u usually get half what they adviretise. MAcWorld did a review this month on APE base station & other 80211g routers. its worth reading

[Angus_D]

The speed has probably dropped to reflect actual throughput... You're highly unlikely to actually get 54mbps.

[alex_kac]

http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?...7237&cid=3

Its marketing. Not technical.

[Graymalkin]

This is not an across the board speed drop. It is a minor revision to the 802.11g specification to allow it to better interoperate with 802.11b networks running on the same channel.

If you've got an all 802.11g network with one or two nodes stuck on 802.11b equipment, say some older Powerbooks or iBooks, the 802.11b nodes have a hell of a time working with the network. The time slicing required to allow for the 11b devices to run on the 11g network is a bit awkward and doesn't always work out well, much to the detriment of the 11b nodes. This revision will tell 11g nodes to throttle back to a fast but not quite so fast speed when 11b devices are detected. The new revision basically tells 11g devices to pad their transmissions when 11b devices are detected in order to allow enough room for them to get a word in edgewise.

Besides the sensational headline the author does not do a good job comparing 11b and 11g in a meaningful sense. When talking about wireless you're talking a half-duplex system. There are 11Mbps per data channel at most to play around with but due to protocol overhead and the fact the device has to listen as often as it talks means the real world throughput is roughly half the available bandwidth. If you are getting 5Mbps throughput on an 11b network it is going about as fast as it is going to go. If you're getting 20-22Mbps on a 11g network it is going about as fast as it is going to go. Throughput remember is the actual amount of meaningful data sent between two computers, the bandwidth is how wide of a communication channel those two computers have available to them.

The duplex issue is the same reason people end up confused about their data throughput on wired networks. They see that their Ethernet card is 100BaseT as is their hub and wonder why network transfers never reach 100Mbps. They fail to realize they may have 100Mbps equipment but it is running in half-duplex mode meaning it can't transmit and receive concurrently. If they were to drop in a full-duplex switch or hub they'd notice an enormous increase in throughput on their network.

[Eug]

Originally posted by RMXO:
daym 5mb is actually pretty good for 80211b. i only get 1-2mb max if im lucky. i heard u usually get half what they adviretise. MAcWorld did a review this month on APE base station & other 80211g routers. its worth reading

I've tested it with my PC laptop and have gotten about 4.5 Mbps.

100BaseT gave me around 70 Mbps IIRC.