Download via wireless

I understand that when one uses wireless, the data transmission speed
depends on the speed of the wireless network one connects to.

Can one use a high speed connection via wireless to download files, or
are there some problems with wireless connections which make them
impractical for downloads?

Jim O'Reilly

"Jim O'Reilly" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:e25mro$r4s$(E-Mail Removed)...
>I understand that when one uses wireless, the data transmission speed
>depends on the speed of the wireless network one connects to.
>
> Can one use a high speed connection via wireless to download files, or are
> there some problems with wireless connections which make them impractical
> for downloads?
>

I don't know about now. But when I was using wireless back in the 2002-2003,
I never used wireless to download files as it would take triple sometimes
quadruple the time it would take a wire connection running at 100 mbps.

Duane

(E-Mail Removed) (Jim O'Reilly) wrote in
news:e25mro$r4s$(E-Mail Removed):

> I understand that when one uses wireless, the data transmission
> speed depends on the speed of the wireless network one connects to.

Your maximum speed will be the minimum of the speed of your wireless
connection and your WAN connection.

> Can one use a high speed connection via wireless to download files,
> or are there some problems with wireless connections which make
> them impractical for downloads?

At home, the speed of my DSL connection is slower than the speed of
my wireless connection, so the maximum transfer speed is the same
whether I'm using my hard-wired machine in the den or my wireless
laptop in the kitchen.

There are folks who have access to really fast WAN connections, or
those whose wireless connections are sub-optimal, but I suspect this
will be the case for most users.

--
Bert Hyman | St. Paul, MN | (E-Mail Removed)

> Can one use a high speed connection via wireless to download files, or
> are there some problems with wireless connections which make them
> impractical for downloads?

Depends on the speed of the connection to your ISP and the connection
speed to your wireless AP at the time.

For example, I have a 10Mbps cable service, so you say that when
connected to an AP at 54Mbps, when you take into account that it's half
duplex and then add in some protocol overhead, it will deliver maybe
20Mbps throughput at best so no problem.

On the other hand, move away from the AP by a couple of walls and my
connection to the AP can be right down to 1Mbps therefore the wireless
is the bottleneck by a major factor.

David.

Jim O'Reilly wrote:
> I understand that when one uses wireless, the data transmission speed
> depends on the speed of the wireless network one connects to.
>
> Can one use a high speed connection via wireless to download files, or
> are there some problems with wireless connections which make them
> impractical for downloads?
>
> Jim O'Reilly

Go for it, you'll be glad you did.

I presume you're talking d/l from the web. No problems using wireless
for downloading here. In theory, the wireless connection is slower; in
practice, many other factors affect speed as much or more than the
wireless connection will. I don't think you'll notice any difference if
you are on consumer-level DSL. Your wired connection is running nowhere
its theoretical maximum speed anyhow, nor will your wireless one.
Besides, if you are on an in-house network, business or home, the number
of people accessing the network at any one time will have a greater
effect on overall speed of network traffic than the difference between
wired and wireless.

I use an Apple Airport access point. Works very well, very fast with the
Powerbook (Tiger), not so fast with the Acer TravelMate (WinXP). The
difference is partly the software firewall (Zone Alarm) on the Acer, and
partly Windows XP: the Acer supposedly runs at 1.8GHz, the Powerbook at
1.4GHz. If you trust the router to be adequate protection, turn off the
software firewall, and your speed will roughly double.

Since subscribing to DSL, I have also found amazing differences between
servers (ie, websites), and also between different times of day on the
same server. Clearly, hardware and number of connections at their end
can have a drastic effect on your download speed. FTP is faster, they
say, but I haven't noticed that much difference.

I've also noticed that (with Windows browsers, anyhow) that the download
starts in the background as soon as you click OK for Save to Disk. The
download goes on while you are navigating to save location (and possibly
changing the file name to suit your inability to decode random
conglomerations of letters and numbers). The Download Manager actually
slows down the download as soon as you click on save: it must have a
high overhead. But with smaller files, the download may well be complete
by the time you've clicked Save. Curious.

Finally, your distance from the ISP's DSL node will affect your download
speed a lot more than wireless will. the further the distance, the
dirtier the signal, hence the higher the number of repeat packets, thus
reducing the net download speed.

HTH

On Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:01:32 -0400, in alt.internet.wireless , Jim
O'Reilly <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Can one use a high speed connection via wireless to download files, or
>are there some problems with wireless connections which make them
>impractical for downloads?

Even 802.11b wireless is 200x faster than old dialup, and its
typically still 2-10x faster than broadband, so wireless works just
fine for normal file downloads. Obviously if you're backing up a 200GB
hard disk you may have more issues.
Mark McIntyre
--

> Even 802.11b wireless is 200x faster than old dialup, and its
> typically still 2-10x faster than broadband, so wireless works just

Hmmm, NTL & Telewest cable offer 10Mbps, plenty of ADSL offering 8Mbps
and higher, 802.11b is going to struggle there at anything other than
optimum conditions and add in encryption, typically WEP on that age gear
and it's going to go even slower at around 450kbyte/s for typical
consumer gear.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you but the actual numbers are
important these days as we're quite a long way on past 1Mbps DSL being
top speed and the question is about downloads specifically and not just
html pages.



David.

On Wed, 19 Apr 2006 23:13:35 GMT, in alt.internet.wireless , David
Taylor <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>> Even 802.11b wireless is 200x faster than old dialup, and its
>> typically still 2-10x faster than broadband, so wireless works just
>
>Hmmm, NTL & Telewest cable offer 10Mbps, plenty of ADSL offering 8Mbps

"up to"... :-)

>and higher, 802.11b is going to struggle there

Well, strictly speaking, the question was "is it ok for downloads" not
"will I be able to max out my pipe", so irrespective of the limitation
of 11b, its still gonna work just fine. Heck ,we lived with dialup and
then 256K broadband for years.

Mark McIntyre
--

> >Hmmm, NTL & Telewest cable offer 10Mbps, plenty of ADSL offering 8Mbps
>
> "up to"... :-)

Sure and on downloads, I see a smige over 1Mbyte per sec on some sites.
My wireless in my office falls back to 1Mbps which makes it a major
bottleneck.

> Well, strictly speaking, the question was "is it ok for downloads" not
> "will I be able to max out my pipe", so irrespective of the limitation

You're as bad as me at being pedantic, I should share with you my tale
of a ticket inspector at Paddington station saying "Can I see your
ticket" to which I continually answered "NO". It eventually involved
about 4 ticket inspectors, 2 police offers and myself delivering a small
education lesson about the difference between "Can I?" and "May I?"

> of 11b, its still gonna work just fine. Heck ,we lived with dialup and
> then 256K broadband for years.

I told a friend of mine long ago when a V22 modem was exciting that
faster modem speeds would not mean that you spent less time online but
rather that the time online would be determined by the available time
you had to spare. The only variable that would change would be the
amount of data that you would transfer in that time.

Of course, we need fat pipes now because of bloated html, multimedia
rich pages and downloads of cruddy software requiring bloatware
libraries. Long gone are the days when a useable program contained the
8086 assembler of just two bytes long:-

CD 19

David.

[POSTED TO alt.internet.wireless - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]

In <(E-Mail Removed) m> on Thu, 20 Apr 2006
15:20:06 GMT, David Taylor <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Of course, we need fat pipes now because of bloated html, multimedia
>rich pages and downloads of cruddy software requiring bloatware
>libraries. Long gone are the days when a useable program contained the
>8086 assembler of just two bytes long:-

In fact dial-up still works just fine, and even medium-speed pipes (e.g.,
ISDN) are quite usable.

--
Best regards, SEE THE FAQ FOR ALT.INTERNET.WIRELESS AT
John Navas <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FAQ_for_alt.internet.wireless>