[Leaplist] advice on wifi router please

[Brian Rose]

Aaron Morrison wrote:
>>
>> Well, the "on the box" spec speed is 54 Mbit/sec.  In reality, 802.11g 
>> means you'll get about 18-22 MBit/sec, [snip]

This may be a bit dated, but here it goes.

What companies print on the box is the biggest number they can find. 
Speeds for 802.11g, USB, SDRAM, etc. are all victims.

Basically they print the wire speed, or the speed of the signal. This 
only vaguely relates to the actual capacity of the signal to carry 
information. For example, USB2 (480Mbps) is often touted as being faster 
than Firewire (Original was 400Mbps). But since USB is a bus you have 
the host on the USB bus butting in periodically to see if anything on 
the bus has changed. This interrupts any sessions going and dramatically 
slows things down since the host has to listen for a period of time for 
a response.

Since firewire is point-to-point, there is much less "chatter" on the 
signal line and the payload can be transferred much more efficiently.

This kind of thing also happens in Wireless, and ethernet, and auto 
sales (MPG ratings) ...

In other words, people expect to get X without understanding Y.