It's not exactly a speed/bandwidth issue, it's that there are no 802.11g cards available for the 16-bit PCMCIA interface, which is what Squeezebox has. The issue is that it's just the wrong bus for 802.11g, not that it's too slow.
802.11g modules use PCI, either in the form of CardBus (uses the same connector as PCMCIA, but totally different interface) or MiniPCI.
The real benefit of 802.11g for our purposes is partly the 2x+ raw throughput, but mainly the improved range, better reliability, and better "playing well with others" on the spectrum.
As far as the ethernet interface is concerned: it is 10Mbps full-duplex, which as several people have pointed out, is nearly as fast as 802.11g anyway. If squeezebox had an enormous amount of memory for audio buffering, then 100Mbps would be nice, because it would let the buffer fill/refill very quickly. However, this is WAY beyond the throughput needed for PCM streaming, so it wouldn't make any difference with the memory we have - on 10Mbps ethernet it already fills in less than 200ms.
On Mar 3, 2005, at 8:27 AM, Aaron Zinck wrote:
"Dan Goodinson" wroteI thought there was some issue with CPU, which means that the PCMCIA
card couldn't be upgraded... I thought it was something related to bus
width or similar...
Sorry if I've given wrong info ;-)
No, you're fine--indeed the bus isn't sufficiently fast to handle a g PCMCIA
card--Jason was just pointing out that if you do use a wireless bridge the
theoretical throughput of wireless G exceeds the throughput of the
squeezebox's wired nic (making the squeezebox's nic the bottleneck in this
situation), thus his point that you will not be able to realize the full
theoretical throughput of wireless G on a squeezebox even with a bridge (at
most you'll get 10mb half-duplex). This won't be a problem, though--clearly
10mb half-duplex is plenty fast for the application (haven't heard of any
bandwidth problems with wired players) and indeed the g bridge will perform
better than the 802.11b that's built-in to the box. You'll probably see
practical speeds of ~5mbps with b while with the g (depending on your
environment) you may well fully saturate the available 10mb half-duplex
bandwidth.
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