Do you need 108?

You're not alone.

this is what you buy, make sure you get version 2. The original version was a loser.

8Mbits/sec? Where's this?

Wireless hardware is NOT an investment. Everything you can buy today will obsolete within a few years. That's not to say it won't be useable or functional, but simply that advances in protocols, security, acronyms, and features will make todays hardware somewhat neanderthal. For example, improvements in 802.11i security will probably require new hardware. 802.16 could replace everything. MIMO (802.11n) technology could offer spectacular performance and reliability improvements. Figure on a 2-3 year useful lifetime.

108Mbits/sec is a proprietary kludge designed to squeeze more performance out of 802.11g under ideal conditions. There are various methods and chipsets, none of which are controlled by a standards organization. You'll never see 108Mbits/sec thruput. Typicial is less than half the connection speed. Thuput also varies with the type of traffic. UDP streaming goes faster than TCP which requires acknowledgements. Range is an issue as the radios will drop in connection speed in an attempt to keep the error rate low. That will cause a drop in thruput.

If you have a good strong signal, 802.11g will connect at 54Mbits/sec and deliver 20-27Mbits/sec. That should be sufficient for anything that you're doing. If your signal is less than spectacular, the connection speed will be reduced along with the thruput. My guess(tm) is that 802.11g will drop to about 25Mbits/sec connection, for a thruput of about 8-10Mbits/sec, which should be adequate.

There's quite a bit on the topic of speed vs performance on:

the "NeedtoKnows" section. It's a bit clumsy reading with all the advertising and 15 part articles, but the content is worth the effort.

Chart of 108 and 54 802.11g performance vs range via a "walk test". Note that thruput drops rapidly with distance, not matter what technology is used, and that while 108 offers an initial speed advantage, the performance drops rapidly to where it is the same as 54

802.11g. dip in the middle was at 300ft, where performance was about 2Mbits/sec thruput. Extrapolating against the time scale, my guess is that greater than 8Mbits/sec thruput will work to about 100ft.

It's gonna be interesting to see how 8Mbits/sec works with the default TCP/IP RWIN (receive window) of 64KBytes. In theory, your maximum latency (ping time) is: Window Size / speed = latency 512Kbits / 8000Kbits/sec = 64 msec If the latency greater than 64 msec, then the web server will stop and wait for your TCP ack's to arrive before sending any more data. That will slow things down. Windoze 2K and XP support largerer window sizes but not all web servers do. You might wanna run a test:

see where you stand when you get it running.