Does the wireless lower the band width?

The width of a band is usually 6-10, but depends on the width of the street; tubas and french horns lower the band's width. ;-)

I don't know what your real question is, so I'll answer a couple:

1. WiFi links do dynamically change data rate based on signal quality and interference.

1. WiFi links are typically slower than wired links: for today's typical SOHO links, 54 Mb/s < 100 Mb/s.

2. WiFi links are typically less efficient than wired links, due in part to protocol differences. Sustained disk-disk transfers over a decent SOHO 100 Mb/s wired path show >75% of that 100 Mb/s; my expectation for a comparable infrastructure WiFi path are more like 25-50% of that 54 Mb/s, and can be far less with interference.

1. With two good PCs connected to a DSL/cable modem, one via a wired 100 Mb/s link to a router and one via a 54 Mb/s WiFi link to the same router, both PCs should get about the same sustained download speed from the web, because most DSL and cable connections are much slower than either wired or WiFi links.

"Franconero" hath wroth:

Bandwidth and thruput are two different animals. You can have an 8 lane freeway, but if the traffic is bad, you're not going to be moving very fast.

If you're playing games on your local LAN, you're probably using a

100baseT-FDX (full duplex) connection, which will have a maximum TCP thruput of about 80Mbit/sec. UDP is somewhat higher (because it doesn't require ack's). If you add 802.11g wireless to the network, your thruput will be about 25Mbits/sec maximum. See chart at: | that this is under ideal conditions (no interference, strong signals, no reflections, etc). A tolerable rule of thumb is that thruput is about half the wireless connection speed.

You might be able to go somewhat faster with non-standard technologies, such as Turbo-G, MIMO, Afterburner, and such. The fastest sustained thruput I've personally seen is about 50 Mbits/sec TCP with a Linksys SRX (Airgo) system. See: |

my comments on some of the technology.

Of course, if you're running your games over the internet, then maximum thruput will probably be limited by the speed of the internet connection. As long as the wireless thruput is somewhat faster than the broadband connection, it will have little effect.

Good to see that there is still someone around who knows the diference between bandwidth and throughput!!