Wired vs. Wireless speed question.

[often mrunderstood]

I have a Linksys WRT54GS
and was wondering what kind of performance hit (if any) I will take when I move from my current wired config to wireless?

I play some games on the internet, sometimes with both machines simultaneously. Will it be better to leave one machine wired and the other wireless? I would prefer to clean up my cables altogether (both wireless), but may reconsider if there is a significant loss of performance.

Thanks!
Sean

 

[DaveW]

In my experience, the wireless speed should be plenty for online gaming. Give it a shot and move back to wired if your experience differs from mine

 

[BobK]

Wireless is considerably faster than most cable modems.

 

[iain]

Wireless is a lot slower than wired, for three reasons.

1. The wired speed you have in your home network is probably 100Mb/sec. Wireless will be between 11 and 56 (probably 11).

2. Wireless speed drops off a lot faster. With wired, you can be pretty confident of getting 60% of the headline speed. My 11Mb wireless connection often drops to 1 or 2Mb.

3. Wireless is a shared (non-switched) environment so if there are multiple computers using wireless, they all share the bandwidth.

Having said all that, since the ADSL or cable modem speed is probably 512kb/sec or 1Mb/sec, assuming you only have one wireless device it's very unlikely that going to wireless will have any impact on online gaming.,