Where are the bottlenecks?

I'm using a USB 802.11b dongle on USB 1.0.
Several speedchecks at different sites all
report
483.9, 488.4, 504.0, 458.0 kbps
1MB in 17.2, 17.3 secs
Storage 59.6 and 59.1 kbps
Would an 802.11g dongle (router supports
802.11g) go faster?
Would USB2.0 go faster?
Is the PC speed a limiting factor?
Is the ISP the limiting factor?

<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> I'm using a USB 802.11b dongle on USB 1.0.
> Several speedchecks at different sites all
> report
> 483.9, 488.4, 504.0, 458.0 kbps
> 1MB in 17.2, 17.3 secs
> Storage 59.6 and 59.1 kbps
> Would an 802.11g dongle (router supports
> 802.11g) go faster?
> Would USB2.0 go faster?
> Is the PC speed a limiting factor?
> Is the ISP the limiting factor?
>
>
The bottleneck is between your ISP and the site you are connecting to. The
wireless router and dongle can send data hundreds of times faster than your
line/connection can.
Changing everything at your end will do nothing to speed up the route
between your ISP and the other site. Unless your ISP or any of the sites
borrow your PC then it has nothing to do with the speed of traffic between
sites and your ISP.
Common sense really.

On 24 Nov 2005 19:45, "ray" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>The bottleneck is between your ISP and the site you are connecting to.

If a cable is used to the router that can be checked conclusively, and those
speed tests retried for comparison. *several sites* mentioned by OP


>The wireless router and dongle can send data hundreds of times faster than
>your line/connection can.

but might not be... 'capable' doesn't guarantee it being the case...


>Common sense really.

I try not to take anything for granted... test, test, test again...

(E-Mail Removed) wrote in news:(E-Mail Removed):

> I'm using a USB 802.11b dongle on USB 1.0.
> Several speedchecks at different sites all
> report
> 483.9, 488.4, 504.0, 458.0 kbps
> 1MB in 17.2, 17.3 secs
> Storage 59.6 and 59.1 kbps

> Would an 802.11g dongle (router supports
> 802.11g) go faster?

Wireless LAN is unlikely to be slower than ADSL unless you have truly
terrible wireless reception. However if transferring large data files
between local machines, wireless can be a big limiting factor.

> Would USB2.0 go faster?

USB1 should be fine for a connection of up to 8Mb, since it runs at
1.5MB/sec (=12Mb/sec).


> Is the PC speed a limiting factor?

Very unlikely, even a pentium 166 should be fine and even then most of the
cpu power is going to be used for webpage rendering rather than data
transfer.

if wrote:
> (E-Mail Removed) wrote in news:(E-Mail Removed):
>
>> I'm using a USB 802.11b dongle on USB 1.0.
>> Several speedchecks at different sites all
>> report
>> 483.9, 488.4, 504.0, 458.0 kbps
>> 1MB in 17.2, 17.3 secs
>> Storage 59.6 and 59.1 kbps
>
>> Would an 802.11g dongle (router supports
>> 802.11g) go faster?
>
> Wireless LAN is unlikely to be slower than ADSL unless you have truly
> terrible wireless reception. However if transferring large data files
> between local machines, wireless can be a big limiting factor.
>
>> Would USB2.0 go faster?
>
> USB1 should be fine for a connection of up to 8Mb, since it runs at
> 1.5MB/sec (=12Mb/sec).
>
>
>> Is the PC speed a limiting factor?
>
> Very unlikely, even a pentium 166 should be fine and even then most
> of the cpu power is going to be used for webpage rendering rather
> than data transfer.


Actually that is not neccesarily true, as the speed the PC can display
graphics & deal with all the hidden activex/java etc on a lot of pages
can actually slow the speeds down noticably.

Not sure whether this is a BT urban myth or the truth, but there was one
call out to someone complaining about connection speeds who was running
Windows XP in 16bit not 32 as his system couldn't cope with running it
in the more normal 32 bit mode & so obviousely everything was running
slow. I personally have seen systems which appeared to lack speed
connection wise but on closer inspection the slow down was caused by the
pauses when the PC in question was processing the data it had downloaded
before it downloaded the next lot of data.

Remember also if you are using any USB type connection you are using
more of the limited system resources than if you are using an ethernet
solution.

Kraftee wrote on Thu, 24 Nov 2005 23:16:14 -0000:

> Not sure whether this is a BT urban myth or the truth, but there was one
> call out to someone complaining about connection speeds who was running
> Windows XP in 16bit not 32 as his system couldn't cope with running it in
> the more normal 32 bit mode & so obviousely everything was running slow. I
> personally have seen systems which appeared to lack speed

Sounds like a BT engineer making up stories. XP is a 32-bit OS, it doesn't
have a "16-bit mode" (it has a 16-bit subsystem to allow 16-bit apps to run,
but it's an emulation layer). Possible it was that the chipset drivers
weren't installed properly (or some other problem with the drivers or IDE
interface) which resulted in the hard drive(s) running in PIO mode (or
having a very very old system that didn't have DMA) rather than DMA mode
which could result in significant performance issues if the machine was
doing a lot of disk I/O (eg. trying to run XP with 64mb of RAM, or lots of
apps with only 128MB).

Dan