mcharkowski said:
I think some people around here have had a bad experience and written off the transfer slowness to a bottleneck in the TiVo hardware, and that just ain't the case.
I should have clarified in my original post, but there *is* a bottleneck in the TiVo hardware that prevents an off the shelf 11g adapter from performing at its full transfer rates, and in fact, on some TiVo boxes limits 11g adapters to near 11b speeds. The newest 540 series boxes used a cheaper, less efficient network chipset to reduce cost, and the bottleneck on these boxes is pretty serious. (That is where the new "official" TiVo Wireless G adapter will come in handy -- it will offload some of the processing that the 540 is notably weak on).
It is not a myth, this entire
thread is full of posters who report slower (or equivalent) transfer rates when switching from 11b to 11g. Even TiVoBill chimed in with his comment that users should not expect much of a performance boost with off the shelf 11g adapters. And filbay summed it up pretty nice at post 161:
filbay said:
Only way to find out is to try. In my case... [my] Dlink G adapter is actually slower than my B adapter.
Some reports with G adapter transfers improved a little, some reports it's the same, and then some (like me) G is slower.
Seriously, we aren't making this stuff up. But if you have an older box, a 140 or 240, you stand a better chance with off the shelf 11g adapters.
mcharkowski said:
I went from a D-Link DWL-122(11B) where I was getting ~250k/s, to a D-Link DWL-G122(11G) and had my transfer rates just about double to ~475k/s. Granted, the whole network should be switched to G to achieve this performance, cuz as soon as you throw a B client on the network things will slow down.
The difference between a "g only" and "mixed mode" wireless network is almost negligible, but I suppose it does add up with large file transfers (like video!). See my post
here, back from March 2005, where I did some experiments with "g only" vs "mixed mode" that showed a gain of ~0.2 - 0.3 Mbps when the network is in "g only" mode.
Of course, YMMV.
Myself, I will be trying out the new "official" wireless G adapter, as I suspect it will give me the gains that a normal, off the shelf 11g adapter could not.