[NTLUG:Discuss] Wireless Home Network

[Robert Pearson]

>Robert Pearson wrote:
>> The first card I got was the 802.11b because it was a
>> PCMCIA card. It worked fine but the response was
>> noticeable slower than wired.

Steve Baker wrote---
>Well, that's to be expected.  Most wired ethernet setups
>go at 100Mbits/sec these days (100baseT) - you can bet 1Gbit/sec
>too (although they perform more like 300Mbits/sec in practice).

Yes, I am aware of that. There was something else going on
with the Wireless or my laptop.
I was willing to try 802.11b because I had worked in many
Enterprise and SOHO environments when only 10 mbps
Shared Ethernet was available. Shared 10 mbps Ethernet
had throughput problems when anyone on the same subnet
was doing large file transfers, backups or a graphics
program sending lots of pictures to the display. It was ok
if you were the only one on the subnet.
All these problems went away when 10 mbps Switched
Ethernet came out. In my experience a standard Desktop
display can be fully satisfied with a good, steady 10 mbps.
Switched Ethernet does this. 10 mbps switched is the cake,
100 mbps is just more icing on the cake.
We are currently going round-and-around about Gigabit and
10Gigabit to the Desktop. It doesn't make sense except the
same way that having an 80 GB hard disk does. You can't
get anything smaller for less money.
Maybe if we were all running P2P (Peer-to-Peer) and
sharing lots of MP3, video and multi-media Information
we would need all of Gigabit and maybe 10Gigabit.
That's for the Future to decide.
I did a study trying to show that more memory,
used or not, and SATA ($$$)or SSD ($$$$) drives
improved performance for all machines. This was
marginal on the low performance user, based primarily
on estimated Customer Service Calls scanned from the
database, to obvious improvement for power users and
high end applications that are CPU and disk intensive.
Some of the numbers were like 10x faster with MAX
memory and SSD for swap. Depends on the
application environment. This would be overkill for
just email and Internet cruising.
My boss rejected the study out-of-hand. He will buy
Gigabit or 10Gigabit when the vendors convince him it
is time. That time is when 10/100 mbps is either no
longer available or more expensive than Gigabit or
10Gigabit.
Why? He owns a car that has 160 mph on the
speedometer. He claims to have never gone faster
than 85 mph. So why didn't he buy a car that only had
85-90 mph on the speedometer? Status? Or maybe
the same reason you buy stereo equipment that is way
more powerful than any level you will ever listen to it
at. You have to have the power extremes to get that
nice low volume fidelity. I believe computers work
the same way as good stereo equipment and fast cars.

Thanks,

Robert Pearson
rdpears2001 at yahoo.com

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