wireless bottlenck?

I have an 802.11b linksys access point. 3 pcs are connected to wirelessly to it. it seems to work great but when i get home from work and both of my brothers are on the network i notice a serious slow down.

i did not notice this when we were wired. does this make sence? is the wireless signal limited in bandwidth?

thanks,
matt

 

Of course it is limited. Wireless is much slower then wired. It also tends to be less reliable, it's major upside is the easy of install (not having to run wires), there's no real reason to switch form a wired network to a wireless one, unless you want to be able to walk around the house with your laptop/desktop and even then, I'd just run both.

Wireless G (which is typically what people run these days) is 54Mbps. Where as wired tends to be either 100Mbps or if you're using HW bought within the last 2 years or so it's likely to be 1000Mbps. So as you can see wireless is at best about half the speed of a wired network. Although normally this doesn't bother people since the internet connection tends to come in on either a 5 or 10Mbps connection.

Of course in your case you're running a wireless B network which generally provides about 3.5 to 4.5Mbps max. I believe it's max listed speed is 11Mbps, so the problem you're having is a bandwidth issue. You're wireless simply isn't fast enough if all of you are using it. Although it shouldn't be super slow. Odds are you're sharing 4.5Mbps amongst 3 people which means each person is seeing about 1.3Mbps each. Which can be kinda slow.

So in your case I'd suggest just hooking the wired network backup and leave the wireless one for if you want to move around. Or switch to a wireless G network and you should have enough bandwidth as well.

 

Great response thanks a lot