Everyone probably knows this, but just in case they don't..
Anytime you see a wireless speed you can probably cut it in half for the actual speed you get. Furthermore the more wireless clients you have on a channel, even if they are not transmitting, the slower the network operates, although its not a huge difference. At leasts thats my experience with 802.11b networks and the orinoco driver series.
One small point. I've connected 10Mb devices to a cheap 10/100 hub and everything works fine. I don't know what its actually doing internally of course. Of course if your still using hubs and having bandwidth issues, well switches were quite cheap last I looked.
As a final comment. If your doing anything beyond web browsing. (I.E. mythtv or playing multimedia files over a network, then avoid 802.11b as much as feasible. It simply isn't fast enough to keep everything responsive. That doesn't mean you can't use it for those purposes where you truly need it, but well sometimes the time you save not running a cable, you lose later. 802.11g might solve those issues, but I've never seriously tried to get it working under linux.) (Netgear MA311 pci cards with the orinico and/or hostap driver series are my recommendations for linux for 802.11b.)
Matt Mossholder wrote:
Brad,
Just to clear something up... a 10Mbit client connected to a 100Mbit network does NOT "10x the bandwidth it is using, because it is time that matters." The only way to connect a 10Mbit client to a 100Mbit network is via a switch or bridge, which does rate conversion on each frame. Hench, a 10Mbit client's traffic will be converted to 100Mbit when the frame is sent out by the switch. The time in between the frames to/from the 10Mbit client is free for use by other systems.
Now, if we are talking about something like 802.11, that's a different story.... 802.11b clients definitely have a negative impact on the 802.11g traffic, when the b and g clients are both on the same channel. This is because everything is a broadcast, and in this instance, it really is the time that matters. The 802.11g clients can't talk or be talked to while the 802.11b systems are...speaking... so...slowly....
I agree with everything else though :)
--Matt
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