[Hypnosis]

I just put an airport extreme card in my ibook g4 and was testing it out with my linksys 54G wireless router. Now i'm not good at this tech stuff but how do i know if i'm getting 54mbs transfer.....i know file transfers are slower with wireless compared to a wired set up...but how much slower...let say for a 650 mb file?....this is just a test to see if i'm getting a good connection...thanks you.

[ghporter]

Your 650MB file is in megabytes. You get a MAXIMUM of 54 megaBITS per second file transfer (before overhead and so on). That's a theoretical maximum of 6.75 megabytes per second. Take off the overhead (as much as 25% depending on signal strength and quality), and you obviously slow down quite a bit. That means transfering that file (just for the bits to move, not for either end to prepare for the move) should take NO LESS THAN 97 seconds and can take more than 130 seconds. There's no way for the user to directly time the setup and finalization steps the OS takes in transfering a file, so if the file takes three minutes, you're not doing too badly. If it takes over 5 (and you have a strong, high quality signal), then you may have some problems.

[Hypnosis]

i'm getting about 5 mins for a 650 mb file and thats at full strength.

[ghporter]

That's not too bad, but you obviously aren't incredibly happy with the speed. This is one of the reasons I haven't moved up to "G" wireless-it's more picky about all sorts of things, and doesn't always run at the speed you expect it to. And remember, your built-in network card runs at 100Mbps if it's connected to another 100BaseT device-at least twice as fast, and far less overhead-so it's usually much more efficient to use a cable to transfer files of that size.

I think you're getting pretty good speed out of your wireless network. Your little indicator bar will tell you when your connection (not just speed but quality, including packet loss and retransmissions) is not doing well.

[Hypnosis]

i can see what you mean about it not keeping speed....that same file took 8 min to transfer when i tried again..oh well. the main reason i got it was for the internet and it works great so far. Thanks for the help.