Community

but to best I can recall off the top of my head, the major difference between
802.11g and 802.11n were in terms of range, and frequency rather than
the speeds...for now. In the future, 802.11n may support up to 100 mbps.
As for why the apparent loss, probably due to signal strength...again, that's
just my best guess.

Also if you have any Security Enabled like WEP etc that cuts into the available bandwidth as it's constantly transmitting the Security Protocols which get included in the Data Transfer so others are unable to access the data stream.

Of course if you are not using any Security and you have anything within half a Kilometer you are an idiot as the likelihood of having your WiFi and Data Hijacked it right over the top.

So the more Secure that the WiFi Security is the slower the Data Transfer is going to be as each Security Measure adds more to what is being Transmitted in each direction and with WiFi it is always 2 way communication where the computer is calling the WiFi Access Point or whatever and requesting whatever and the WiFi Access Point is delivering whatever was requested and doing Data Checks to prevent and Data Corruption. With a weak signal and high security it's possible that up to 80% of the available bandwidth is being consumed by the Security and Data Checking components of the Wireless link so you only have 20% of the available bandwidth available for Data Transfers.

Yep that's an Extreme Case but Wireless Signals propagate in different ways and there are way too many ways for them to cause problems things like a Brick Wall, Florescent Light, Microwave Oven or even a Cordless Phone can adversely affect a WiFi Connection.

Col

There is more overhead with wireless too so the same transfer speed will deliver more of what you call data over a wired connection than using wireless. The other thing is that wireless is constantly negotiating speed. If it has too many retrys at 54 Mb it will cut in half, then half again and so on until it gets good transmission. After a number of good transmissions it will double the speed and so on back and forth all the time. So your so called 54 Mb connection may really be a 2 Mb connection.

http://www.epitiro.com/assets/files/WiFi_In_The_Home_Epitiro_V2.pdf

Where something reflective is reflecting the signal backwards, and thus the laptop gets the same packets twice, out of order. When this happens, your laptop has to request those packets again. Often just rotating the laptop can fix these issues.

That's my real question. I do understand the effects of WiFi in general on download speeds.

But if all those effects are equal for both clients, what can you expect in terms of percentage of download speed lost when using a G client as opposed to an N client. Simply because of the difference in link speed (54 vs 150)

There has to be a study on this. No?