Can Wireless-N Deliver the Goods
March 22nd, 2008I bought my current laptop, an Acer Travelmate 800, in June 2003. Yes it’s an antique by todays standards but it was one of the first with built in wireless connectivity.
It’s the original Intel Centrino platform with the Intel PRO Wireless 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter (802.11b). At the same time I bought a Linksys Wireless Router and at the time this was the only wireless signal I could see from my flat. Needless to say I got no interference and although 802.11b maxed out at about 2 Mbits/s in the real world I always had a steady, stable connection.
Now it’s almost 5 years later and at any given time I see between 5 and 15 wireless routers broadcasting their SSIDs plus god knows how many others not broadcasting the SSID.
Even though I’ve since bought a new Netgear router these signals make my wireless connection almost useless. If I can connect at all the signal drops out about every 5 minutes and then reconnects, if I’m lucky. Other times it just drops the connection and stays disconnected until I manually intervene to force a reconnection.
After reading this column by Pc Pros John Honeyball I agree completely. Compared to my wired LAN, WLAN is a joke, the really annoying part is that I so much want it to work well.
I’m planning on upgrading to a new laptop this year, one with the wireless 802.11n standard (maybe out of Draft status by then) and I’m hoping that the interference issue has been somewhat improved with the advent of MIMO technology
My internet connection runs at about 10Mbits/s but I also have a NAS storage device that I use for backups and general storage so I would ideally like that my wireless connection will run at least as fast as my wired connection, at least 40-50 Mbits/s. From what I’ve read 802.11n can achieve this but having been disappointed in the past I’ll wait and see.
At the same time I’ll upgrade my router so all my network devices will also be using Gigabit Ethernet (bar my printer) so at least my wired network will be up to speed.