[threestain]

We've just bought a wireless router and two wireless cards ( for two pcs) for our house (I have airport built in).

I have two questions - 1 does the speed of the network increase when using the router, compared to computer-computer speeds?

And is it possible to increase the network speed from 300kb to the 11 mb its meant to be?

[ghporter]

The speed of your network traffic will depend on many things, but mostly on the quality and strength of your connection. If you're using a computer to distribute Internet connectivity, you will almost definately see an improvement from going to a router; it's all the router does, versus the overhead of pretending to be a router while doing other computer things. Finally, if you're only getting 300kbps from your Internet connection, you'll only get 300kbps through your Airport.

[threestain]

we're getting 512/256 but also the network between the computers should surely be 11MBps?

[bluedog]

Connectivity from the wireless to wireless (not out on the internet) should reach near the theoretical max of 11MBps.

Have you enabled Appletalk?

How are you testing the connection between these machines? Appletalk vs. the TCPIP implementation is going to be much slower. That said, its more likely you have the TCPIP connection if you are running OSX on both machines and still very likely if you are running OS9 with the latest updates available.

I suggest enabling websharing or FTP for the internal machines and access one and try downloading a larger file and see its throughput with one of these protocols. If you have tried FTP or a web HTTP download and the speeds were subpar, then I dunno.

Originally posted by threestain:
we're getting 512/256 but also the network between the computers should surely be 11MBps?

[superlarry]

this is where a little nitpicking comes in handy: it's 11 Mbps, not MBps. that's megabits per second. you have to divide by 8 (8 bits per byte) to get the speed in MB, and this is about 1.375 MB/sec. you actually won't even get this number because of the overhead involved in wireless, because where protocol information and error correction are involved, they use up some bandwidth. wireless encryption adds overhead too.