Using B instead of G network bottleneck

[magruder13]

Hey everyone, I am victim to a known problem by ATT that their 2Wire routers (2701HG-B) they give out are almost all defective. The internet will go out ALL THE TIME, every 5 minutes. Sometimes its random, sometimes its when I go to different websites. For instance, I can play COD MW3 ALL DAY on my ps3 and I will NEVER get disconnected, but if I play WoW and run around a city I cannot get out before I am disconnected over and over and over until I get out of the city. If I try to go to arenajunkies.com I almost ALWAYS get disconnected. If I open chrome while playing wow, I get disconnected.

I have read about a solution though!

If I change it from b/g to only b. I know this limits me to 11mbps but will that be an issue? I did a speed test since I am now on b and it is the same as it should be. I do wireless streaming from my PC to my PS3, will that be limited?

Thanks!

 

[eibgrad]

In terms of the raw numbers (throughput), you'll obviously be limited whenever you drop from G to B. But whether that will affect you depends on your particular needs and usage patterns. For example, if all you ever did was interact w/ the Internet over a 3Mbps dsl connection, you wouldn't feel much impact. But for *local* access where you typically want as much bandwidth as possible, it might. SD (standard def) content is probably marginal on a B network, w/ HD (high def) content being all but impossible without excessive buffering. To make matters worse, each time you add a concurrent wireless user, effective bandwidth drops in HALF, since each is always waiting for the other to complete its communications w/ the wireless router before it can begin its own communications. So the worst case would be having the PC and PS3 both using wireless; concurrency is guaranteed.

 

[magruder13]

Best answer selected by magruder13.