At the beginning of this month I wrote about my satisfaction with my new ISP, DirecPath. For only 20 per month I get a fiber line that I thought had throughput in the area of 26 megabits/sec down and 14 megabits/sec up. As you might be able to piece together from the title of this post, I was a bit wrong.
I was just maxing out the 802.11g throughput of my Linksys WRT54G2 router. I picked it up thinking that I wasn't going to do much wireless networking and that my Internet connection wouldn't be fast enough to warrant the upgrade to 802.11n. Again, I was wrong. When I fired up my lovely Usenet account to download legal files on my new HTPC, things started downloading much faster than I was used to with the MacBook Air over Wi-Fi.
Peak is around 85 megabits/sec.
Some of you might be asking why 802.11g was the issue when I was getting 26mbps, well within the 54mbps theoretical throughput of 802.11g. The keyword is theoretical. I am only 5 feet from the access point with a thin wall in between but my link transmit rate isn't even close to 54mbps and the signal strength isn't as good as it could be. In OS X, you can view additional Wi-Fi network information by option-clicking on the Wi-Fi icon in the menubar.
The point of this post is that 802.11n is useful not only if you do any wireless networking or TimeCapsule backups but also if your Internet connection is ungodly. Until I make the jump to an 802.11n Wi-Fi router, I'll be putting the MacBook Air USB Ethernet adapter to good use.
Are you 802.11n equipped?