Wireless distance and cable speed question

[Donny31]

Greetings all

I recently had to evict my little room I used as a makeshift home office as the wife insisted on it being only a spare bedroom. The modem is still in the room (used to be on my desk 20cm away from my laptop) but I now sit around 8-10m away. At least I'm still inside the house!

In my new 'office', I get a "Very good" signal strength indication from the Netgear DG834GUv5 modem but the results from speedtest.net have shown some decline in speed of about 10%. Although this isn't much on my super slow 384 shaped/uncapped Axxess connection, it still bothers me.

My question - does distance from modem affect connection speed and how does wifi speed compare to using a cable?

Many thanks
Don

 

[SouthBit]

Yes, the distance from the access point does relate to network speed. The further away you are, the slower the speed. I think as well the amount of clients connected also affects the speed. The limiting factor here would be your 384 line though. Even if your signal strenght was 'poor' I don't think you'd notice a decrease in your ADSL speed.

Since you are using the 'G' standard:

"This works in the 2.4 GHz band (like 802.11b), but uses the same OFDM based transmission scheme as 802.11a. It operates at a maximum physical layer bit rate of 54 Mbit/s exclusive of forward error correction codes, or about 22 Mbit/s average throughput."

Where as gigabit ethernet (cable): 1000 Mbit/s