Wireless network is great; is lousey.
Last week I upgraded the wireless portion of our network, from the older 802a (10mb/sec -- megabits per second) standard to the newer 802g (54mb/sec) standard.
Now, I'd've thot that 54 is roughly half of 100, which is the speed of the wired network. Thus, moving files between computers should be only about twice as slow wirelessly as by wire. I have heard that wireless networks are only 70% efficient, while wired networks are about 90% efficient. That makes throughput about 37mb/sec vs 90mb/sec, thus 2.5x slower.
With our DLS service being down (Day 4, and still waiting for the Telus repairman), I needed to move 370MB worth of files from my desktop computer to my notebook computer, the notebook being the only one still with a modem.
I started copying the files during the evening, wirelessly. The next morning, files were still being copied, with Windows Explorer estimating another 122 minutes to go. "I've got work to do," I said, stopping the copying, erasing the copied files, and plugging in a network cable. Over the wire, the copying took about five minutes.
12 hours vs 5 minutes. I knew that wireless networks have efficiency problems, but 144x slower?
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