Download via wireless

I don't know about now. But when I was using wireless back in the 2002-2003, I never used wireless to download files as it would take triple sometimes quadruple the time it would take a wire connection running at 100 mbps.

Duane :)

snipped-for-privacy@panix.com (Jim O'Reilly) wrote in news:e25mro$r4s$ snipped-for-privacy@reader1.panix.com:

Your maximum speed will be the minimum of the speed of your wireless connection and your WAN connection.

At home, the speed of my DSL connection is slower than the speed of my wireless connection, so the maximum transfer speed is the same whether I'm using my hard-wired machine in the den or my wireless laptop in the kitchen.

There are folks who have access to really fast WAN connections, or those whose wireless connections are sub-optimal, but I suspect this will be the case for most users.

Depends on the speed of the connection to your ISP and the connection speed to your wireless AP at the time.

For example, I have a 10Mbps cable service, so you say that when connected to an AP at 54Mbps, when you take into account that it's half duplex and then add in some protocol overhead, it will deliver maybe

20Mbps throughput at best so no problem.

On the other hand, move away from the AP by a couple of walls and my connection to the AP can be right down to 1Mbps therefore the wireless is the bottleneck by a major factor.

David.

Go for it, you'll be glad you did.

I presume you're talking d/l from the web. No problems using wireless for downloading here. In theory, the wireless connection is slower; in practice, many other factors affect speed as much or more than the wireless connection will. I don't think you'll notice any difference if you are on consumer-level DSL. Your wired connection is running nowhere its theoretical maximum speed anyhow, nor will your wireless one. Besides, if you are on an in-house network, business or home, the number of people accessing the network at any one time will have a greater effect on overall speed of network traffic than the difference between wired and wireless.

I use an Apple Airport access point. Works very well, very fast with the Powerbook (Tiger), not so fast with the Acer TravelMate (WinXP). The difference is partly the software firewall (Zone Alarm) on the Acer, and partly Windows XP: the Acer supposedly runs at 1.8GHz, the Powerbook at

1.4GHz. If you trust the router to be adequate protection, turn off the software firewall, and your speed will roughly double.

Since subscribing to DSL, I have also found amazing differences between servers (ie, websites), and also between different times of day on the same server. Clearly, hardware and number of connections at their end can have a drastic effect on your download speed. FTP is faster, they say, but I haven't noticed that much difference.

I've also noticed that (with Windows browsers, anyhow) that the download starts in the background as soon as you click OK for Save to Disk. The download goes on while you are navigating to save location (and possibly changing the file name to suit your inability to decode random conglomerations of letters and numbers). The Download Manager actually slows down the download as soon as you click on save: it must have a high overhead. But with smaller files, the download may well be complete by the time you've clicked Save. Curious.

Finally, your distance from the ISP's DSL node will affect your download speed a lot more than wireless will. the further the distance, the dirtier the signal, hence the higher the number of repeat packets, thus reducing the net download speed.

HTH

Even 802.11b wireless is 200x faster than old dialup, and its typically still 2-10x faster than broadband, so wireless works just fine for normal file downloads. Obviously if you're backing up a 200GB hard disk you may have more issues. Mark McIntyre

Hmmm, NTL & Telewest cable offer 10Mbps, plenty of ADSL offering 8Mbps and higher, 802.11b is going to struggle there at anything other than optimum conditions and add in encryption, typically WEP on that age gear and it's going to go even slower at around 450kbyte/s for typical consumer gear.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you but the actual numbers are important these days as we're quite a long way on past 1Mbps DSL being top speed and the question is about downloads specifically and not just html pages.

:)

David.

"up to"... :-)

Well, strictly speaking, the question was "is it ok for downloads" not "will I be able to max out my pipe", so irrespective of the limitation of 11b, its still gonna work just fine. Heck ,we lived with dialup and then 256K broadband for years.

Mark McIntyre

Sure and on downloads, I see a smige over 1Mbyte per sec on some sites. My wireless in my office falls back to 1Mbps which makes it a major bottleneck.

You're as bad as me at being pedantic, I should share with you my tale of a ticket inspector at Paddington station saying "Can I see your ticket" to which I continually answered "NO". It eventually involved about 4 ticket inspectors, 2 police offers and myself delivering a small education lesson about the difference between "Can I?" and "May I?" :)

I told a friend of mine long ago when a V22 modem was exciting that faster modem speeds would not mean that you spent less time online but rather that the time online would be determined by the available time you had to spare. The only variable that would change would be the amount of data that you would transfer in that time.

Of course, we need fat pipes now because of bloated html, multimedia rich pages and downloads of cruddy software requiring bloatware libraries. Long gone are the days when a useable program contained the

8086 assembler of just two bytes long:-

CD 19

David.

[POSTED TO alt.internet.wireless - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]

In fact dial-up still works just fine, and even medium-speed pipes (e.g., ISDN) are quite usable.

However, the performance of your wireless is more or less under your control. The performance of your BB link is totally outside it.

And a short trip to chokey ? :-)

I assume you mean bytecode, there's no 8086 assembler instruction CD. :->

Mark McIntyre

Usable for what? On it's own that's an unqualified statement. Would I download a 100MB or even a 5GB file via dialup? Not a chance.

For web browsing fine, for moderate downloads, fine but you have to set parameters to allow the term "usable" to have any relevance.

Cycling is usable as a means of transport, would you cycle from East coast to West for a weekend break?

David.

To a point yes my wireless is under my control but the bigger influence is actually the finance department and the Director of Aesthetics, she has a bigger influence than I.

BTW, I do have some influence over the performance of my cable service, it's relative to the drain on my bank account. :)

Not at all, I was right and the ticket monkeys were instructed in suitable phraseology by their manager at the train company concerned.

From the 8086 instruction set:-

11001101 typetype int with type specified

CD 19

David.

[POSTED TO alt.internet.wireless - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]

Pretty much everything.

I assume you have that backwards? ;)

In my experience it actually works reasonably well for almost any practical download given a good download tool; i.e., one that's able to restart interrupted downloads.

I used to routinely cycle 100 miles per day. That covers a lot of ground.

Sailing is likewise a means of transport, and I'll soon be bringing a boat over 2000 nautical miles. Not a weekend break -- more like 2-3 weeks -- but a practical trip nonetheless.

Not everything has to be done the same day, or even in the same weekend. ;)

Your coast or mine? There was a time when I could have done it in England - and enjoyed myself. I don't think I've ever been up to cross-country cycling in Canada :-)

No I don't, that's my point, dial up and ISDN are NOT pratcically usable for large downloads.

Define "practical download" you need to parameterise that phrase for it to have any meaning. While you're there, please also define what you think is a useful timeframe for that download to arrive within. Sure you can resume but if the business or personal reason for the download is to have it in the same hour or even working day then that's an important factor.

That's not the question I asked.

No, which is why the usefulness of slow connections for downloads needs to have parameters defined before it can be classed as useful. Your choice to sail a boat for a few weeks fits within your timescale, if you wanted to do that trip in the same day, you wouldn't sail.

David.

I was referring to the one where John lives. :)

Having said that, which bit of West Coast of England to East? Cornwall to Newcastle? Liverpool to Newcastle? Cornwall to East Anglia, they're pretty different :)

David.

Indeed. For years I managed on dial-up. But I never downloaded anything beyond a maximum of, perhaps, 50MB. If I needed whole CDs, I ordered them (or more often, bought a magazine containing the CD).

Now that I have broadband access, downloading hundreds of megabytes is common (and I'm not even into music & video downloads).

No kidding - I was thinking somewhere narrow but not too hilly :-)

Exactly. I've had to download Virtual Machine DVD ISO's from Microsoft, each set would be several gigabytes. Even on a decent broadband connection, same day would be optimistic for some of them.

I remember the days when downloading a game was 1MB and would take 15 minutes and it doesn't seem that long ago.

David.