Any card supporting 802.11b supports the nominal 11Mbps "burst" data rate, which can usually come close to 6Mbps for good links. Time duplexing does not necessarily cut the rate in half because traffic can be asymmetric (especially for streaming video), but there is overhead for header information at the physical, link, and IP layers for every data packet and there are also transmitted packets that maintain the network but do not contain application data (the video, in this case).
The Cisco statistics (and also the Orinoco, I'm pretty sure) can be very useful, and you want to see how many packet errors occurred compared to total number of packets received. If you lose half of your packets (this should never happen) then your data rate will only be half what it could have been. You also need to check how many duplicate packets were received, because these are also taking up potential throughput. If your packet error rate is high (over 10%), you are probably experiencing interference. If duplicate pakcets received is high, your AP is experiencing interference, because it isn't recognizing your acknowledgements and hence is retransmitting data you already received. Turn off your microwave, cordless phones, bluetooth devices, or whatever else. (Some cordless phones have a range of close to a block, so if your neighbors have them there might not be much you can do.) The signal strength indicator will still be high under interference, and signal quality may even report as ok, since interference may be bursty. (It is possible for interference to be so bad that you don't see high packet error rates because you don't even recognize incoming packets. Compare the number of packets sent by the AP to the number received by your card.) The reason that Qcheck and similar utilities don't tell you anything about your raw data rate is that they operate at the TCP level of the network, while the 802.11b raw data rate is at the physical level of the network. These are insulated from each other by design. I would think that programs could be written (and may already exist) which report all of the data, but they would be specific to your 802.11b driver and your TCP implementation. If anyone is thinking about writing this, please report packet error rates in a meaningful way! I don't fully understand the Cisco statistics---they don't always add up the way that I expect them to (I have the Xircom implementation, so I'm not sure how different that is). John __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
