I'm planning to purchase a Macbook Air. The darn thing doesn't have a ethernet port and you have to use a 10/100 USB dongle to use wired. So it seems that I am going to finally have to upgrade my wireless router to N.

 

What kind of real world speeds can I expect with a reasonably priced wireless N 300 router (with gigabit ports) to transfer files between machines on a internal gigabit network? (Being as close to the router for the best speeds.)

 

Thanks.

I get 230MBps using a Buffalo router when I'm in the same room with the router. The 5Ghz signal seems to drop off real fast. When I go into another room 802.11g is faster. I have not tried N on 2.4Gz.  This should work for USB to gig-e: http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=103&cp_id=10311&cs_id=1031102&p_id=5345&seq=1&format=2

It will in part depend on the connected client.  Some N clients are N150, others N300.

 

The reported connection speed generally bears little relation to the sustainable transfer speed in my experience.  If I see anything over 60M bits/second sustained I think I'm doing very well.  If there are a couple of walls and floors in the way then 20M bits would be good.  As a consequence, I consider wireless OK for stuff like web browsing and audio streaming, but not good enough for HD video streaming.

 

Your other point about 5GHz...  5GHz will always drop off faster than 2.4GHz - that's basically due to the attenuation of radio waves which are absorbed more readily as the frequency increases.

I stream on the 5Ghz band to my HTPC (no walls, USB adapter). Even though the adapter indicates 270 Mb/s, I get sustained throughput of 4-8 MB/s on large file transfers (32-64 Mb/s). The 2.4 Ghz N band has more range but for the unobstructed use I have, 5Ghz has less interference and better speed. 720p and ripped 1080p material stream fine but, not surprisingly, most full bit Blu-rays are choppy. I'm using a D-Link 825 router and adapter and I'm pretty sure there is a significant hardware component to effective bandwidth so YMMV. I'm plan to buy another router to set up in bridge mode using dd-wrt to see if I can improve my throughput by ditching the USB adapter.

Might be cheaper and less of a hassle to give the 1Gig USB adapter a go. I'll be happy if I can get near the transfer speeds of USB 2.0 external drive.

 

These new ultra thin notebooks seem nice to carry around but a pain with the small flash drives.

Shouldn't have bought a Mac 

 

In my experience, wireless is fine for web browsing etc. but once you start streaming in HD or transferring files even N300 won't cut it most of the time. It might be rated at 300Mbps but you are never going to get anywhere near that. Chances are that even a wired 10/100 will be noticably faster than the wireless as it is a much more stable transfer rate. My usual recommendation is; if you can run a cable - do it.