john banks

Have a BT Homehub 2, and I am unclear on a few issues re its wireless-n.

My laptop has 945GM chipset and PCIe 802.11g full height card. It seems that I can install a 5100 or 5300 Intel card (not half height) into it, but the laptop only has two antennae.

Questions:

Can I get 150 or 300 mbps connection by selecting the right card and just using the laptop's two existing antennae with a BT Homehub 2?

If I still have some 802.11g devices on the network, will the speed be lower on the 802.11n laptop?

RoadrunnerV2

Both 5100 and 5300 support 2 streams only so a 2 antenna won't impede on the performance. Right now there are no chipsets to cater for a 3 stream setup (450Mbps), so a 3x3 antenna only helps on range.

The chipsets are similar; the difference is the 5300 has additional features such as EAP, WiFi PIN support. The latter will be useful while no doubt you won't use EAP.

I would avoid 150Mbps wireless-n lite. It is not actually wireless-n. It is 802.11g Super-G 108Mbps tweaked and rebadged. There are some wireless-n 150Mbps with actual wireless-n chipsets but they are fairly rare because its cheaper for the manufactures to use 802.11g chipsets.

802.11g devices on a wireless-n network will impact performance (not range though). However the biggest impact on performance is by not running wireless-n with WPA2 encryption. WPA or WEP encryption has a 20-30% performance penalty the last time I did some testing.

IanW

That is interesting as i have just been given a wireless-n router and my laptop wireless-g can only get a sustained throughput of around 20mbps