[xubuntu-users] network information

Norman Silverstone norman at littletank.org
Sun Aug 18 11:05:52 UTC 2013


< snip >

> That is normal. The best a domestic wireless connection (802.11a and
> 802.11g) can do is a theoretical 54Mbit/s (802.11n will be much faster).
> In practice, speeds are often half this.
>
> Compare this with the slowest wired Ethernet connection at 10Mbit/s, the
> current common domestic speed of 100Mbit/s (twice as fast as wireless),
> and the 'gigabit' speed of 1000Mbit/s (20x faster than wireless) already
> common on desktops and some laptops.
>
> No matter what speed your router is communicating with the Internet at,
> the limiting speed is likely to be your local wireless connection
> (unless you are unfortunate enough still to be using dial-up).

Thanks to both of you for your interesting replies, I hadn't realised 
that the subject was so complicated. From what I have gathered so far, 
suggests that the top speed I measure is what is to be expected and that 
this will be satisfactory for most of my requirements. However, as quite 
a fair amount of time is spent with virtually no speed at all this could 
be the cause of a problem I have had in playing Bridge with my brother 
over the internet.

So, my question is, allowing for the reduction in speed due to the air 
and so on, which piece of hardware is controlling the speed, is it the 
router or the wifi card in my computer? If changing either one or both 
would improve the situation, I would be prepared to do so.

Thanks

Norman





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