Test your own connection
Story for context
(skip) Sunday morning, my son called from the nearby PC Depot where he stood in line to buy 2GB Micro-SD cards, about $2 apiece. At that price, I rather fill the memory card than a CD with photos and video clips to send to my parents in Germany. Re-usable and saves on Postage, too.
"Pa, they have an "n" 300 Mb/s wireless LAN adapter here, for less than $50," piped my son through his brother's cell phone (family contract, calls and texting to the family's phones are free). Naw, thank you. Not now, was my response. Anyway our fiber-connection is rated 100Mb/s (megabit per second) and on a good day delivers 75Mb/s. Measured multiple times with speedtest to the best access point.
Back from the shop, my son told me he could get only three per person of the 2GB SD memory cards, but they still had some. So off I went to get three more and took a look at the "n" 300 Mb/s Wi-Fi (wireless LAN) adapter. The "n" stands for IEEE802.11n, the current fastest wireless protocol. Reading the specs on the box (a hobby and passion of mine) I noticed the wired LAN connection was rated 100 or 10 Mb/s. Ha! Laughable - how could this thing ever pipe 300 Mb/s over its tiny antenna when its wired data stream could not exceded 100Mb/s? So I put this box down, no deal, glad I told him no over the phone.
Next to it, a WiFi adapter rated 54Mbps caught my eye. Same 100 Mbps LAN interface at half the price and in a smaller box, too. This one I bought.
Planex GW-MF54G2.
We connected it and my son with his Vista Laptop got the signal immediately. He logged in and proceeded to set it up (WPA2 with password) while I duplicated his settings on my MacBook.
Speed test dot net
First confirmed the wired LAN speed. Today, speedtest showed close to 30 Mb/s
Unplugged the LAN cable. switched on the wireless, measured again: a bit above 20 Mbps, repeatable, fairly stable, even later when we repeated and wired speed had dropped to about 25 Mbps. So this is the price of convenience.
Wireless on Vista: Clueless
While my MacBook had no trouble getting to the Internet through the WiFi, my son's Vista laptop did not. On that occasion he showed me the nifty network component diagram, with our FTTH fiber connection, switch, router, all shown with proper names but somehow mis-arranged. No, we could not debug it.
In-between my wife's XP PC lost the internet connection and it magically restored after I reset the FTTH connection. Even after 2 hours of dabbling, my son could only get his Vista to recognize the WiFi access point and connect to its internal server, but not through to the Internet. On top of it, his wired connection on Vista is now broken, too, while his XP desktop still works. The reader is invited to draw conclusions.
Update, 2008-12-29: After hours of fiddling with MS-Vista and network setting, even reinstalling Vista on his laptop, my oldest son (15) gave up. I lived through the challenging days of Windows 3.1 interrupt sorting and memory driver configuration as a network admin and was not ready to throw in the towel.
Updated the adapter's firmware and now it is in English (nice). Restored the settings. Same result. Then our younger son's XP machine lost the network connection. Pulled the WiFi power: connection restored. Plugged in again: problem. And his Vista machine could not get through WiFi to internet while my Apple OSX worked fine through all this.
After much combing through the "Access Point" settings, I switched DHCP from "Server" to "off", musing it would not be needed because the fiber-cable router already provided DHCP. Ah, that was it! Wireless on the internet worked finally. My son came up, smiling. And the family's XP machines did not lose connection. Nothing in the WiFi adapter's manual or in the Vista Help system had hinted at this. Usability issues.
Quick speed test from the Apple, unchanged. Conclusion: common computer users (non-techies) would have likely returned the WiFi adapter as problematic or run up a support bill. The Mac OSX is just more robust and fault-tolerant on LAN and WiFi settings.
Running cost
Energy consumption of the wireless LAN adapter is rated at about 6W. If we left it on the whole year, it would consume about 54 kWh in a year, approx. $13 at Japanese electricity rates. In two years, the energy alone costs as much as a new WiFi adapter.
We dislike wasting standby energy as much as we feel it an unnecessary risk to sleep nearby a pulsed 2.4 GHz transmitter (2.45 Ghz is the main resonance frequency of water) with unknown biological effects. So we switch off the unit together with the other LAN components when not needed (another 17W) and save about 60 kWh per year, close to $15, or a dinner for free just from these small connectivity boxes.
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