Wireless Bandwith Needed


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I have an extra pc around that I wanted to experiment setting up wireless. I saw some good prices on wireless b. Tell me if my math is correct here. If wireless b has a speed of 11mb/s, that translates to 1.375 Mbytes/second. then in one minute 82.5 MBs would be tranfered. So if my movie is 1.2 gb, or 1200MB it could travel over the network in just 14.5 minutes, since I am streaming it over a 2 hour period, I have way more bandwith then is needed.

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The rated speed of 11Mbps is the maximum signal rate. Networking protocols work in what's called a "stack". Each protocol is a layer of the stack and as the packet travels up the stack each layer tags a little bit of info onto the packet called the header. The physical layer is seeing 11Mbps, but after the 802.11 header, the IP header and TCP header are applied you aren't getting a full 11Mbps in data throughput. There's more lost to application overhead too.

You'd still easily be able to handle 82.5MBs in a 2 hour period though.

I don't think I could stand to watch anything that was compressed so much that 2 hours fit into 82MBs though.

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82MB was my amount that I would be sending in one minute, assuming I got the max, and my math(reasoning) was correct. most of my movies are about 900 -1200 mb.

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Your math is fine. In one minute you can expect to send 82.5MBs using 802.11b @ 11Mbps. That's not data throughput though ("bandwidth"). That's signaling rate. Your data has to pass through a process that keeps slapping on additional information onto the packets you want to transmit. The total amount of everything going "through the air" is not only your data, but this extra information which takes additional time to send which means your data won't see the total 11Mbps.

If you are streaming ~80MBs over 2 hours you'll have no issue at all with 11Mbps. Streaming something less compressed will be problematic though. I don't think I've ever been able to stream DVD quality video over 11Mbps.

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lets say I actually send in real data about 8mb/s, or 1MByte/s. In the time that it takes to play a 2 hour movie I would have been able to tranfere 7200mb, or about 7gb. In theory, since most dvds after being ripped are between 4.0 to 6.0 gbs, you would not think they would be a problem.

In my situation, streaming mpeg 4 movies, which are just about 1- 1.5 gbs, I should have nothing to worrie about.

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