Mr. Pogue, you don't suppose that those real world speeds of 50-100mbps that you speak of are due to the fact that whatever goes into or out of the Airport has to step down to 100mbps (less, counting overhead) Ethernet speeds to get anywhere, do you?

I doubt it, Wings.

According to Netgear's site, the model Pogue tested uses a Gigabit Ethernet switch, as opposed to the Apple models. And yet the Airport was faster. It's unlikely that the Ethernet connection would have anything to d with the bottleneck in a purely wireless connection (i.e. a 802.11n card talking to a 802.11n router)

I agree. An Ethernet connection would have nothing to do with a wi-fi device talking to just the router. But the vast majority of your data's final destination isn't the router, it's to whatever the router is connected to (and beyond). If THAT connection is, say, 1/2 the speed of your wireless connection then the overall throughput will be limited by that link (or whatever may be beyond that). If I want to use my "n" MacBook to transfer a file to my desktop (Ethernet) how am I going to do that any faster than the 100mbps link from the Airport to the desktop? And while the NetGear that was tested did have GB Ethernet behind it, it SHOULD have been faster... but we don't know the finer details of Pogue's connections & setup.

The gigabit network connections are not desirable for wireless performance. It is for using this device as a network switch in a small office where it would be handy to have gigabit connections for the wired devices.

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Wings wrote:
If THAT connection is, say, 1/2 the speed of your wireless connection then the overall throughput will be limited by that link (or whatever may be beyond that). If I want to use my "n" MacBook to transfer a file to my desktop (Ethernet) how am I going to do that any faster than the 100mbps link from the Airport to the desktop?

Do you mean a cable connection between the desktop computer and the Airport? Why would you do that? The only cable link into my Airport is the one from the wall socket that connects me to the rest of the world.

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coaten wrote:

Do you mean a cable connection between the desktop computer and the Airport? Why would you do that? The only cable link into my Airport is the one from the wall socket that connects me to the rest of the world.

In the past, it's been better to connect a computer to the router via cable than via a wireless network. I've done both with my PowerBook G4. The 100/BASE-T Ethernet connection is faster than the Airport Extreme card (802.11g) talking to an Apple Airport Extreme base station only a few feet away. If I move the PowerBook to the other side of my small house, the data rate drops a bit. It even depends upon the orientation of the PowerBook, as the antenna is slightly directional.

In regard to Pogue's article, do note that he got data rates much less than 100 Mbps with the Belkin and Netgear routers. (Of course, for Internet access--probably the most common use for wireless networks in the home, the bottleneck is not the router but the Internet connection.)