Currently, we’re using ADSL broadband, and the network point is in my room, so I am using an Ethernet cable to connect to the modem. We split the bill for the broadband.
The landlord of the unit I am staying at is considering an upgrade to a fiber optics network (it’s just a few dollars more). However, the network point will have to be in the living room, which means that I have to use wireless LAN, and there’s a thick wall in the way.
The fiber optics network is 50Mbps (on paper), while my current ADSL broadband runs at 15Mbps. Will I get any increase in bandwidth if I am to switch from an Ethernet cable to a 15Mbps to a wireless LAN connecting to a 50Mbps line?
(Supposing I am using a 802.11a or 802.11g wireless LAN).
You should probably upgrade to an 802.11n router (and your computer might need a new wifi card too).
Both a and g max out on paper at 54Mbps, but Wikipedia says real-world throughput is more like 20Mbps.
n should get you safely past that.
And (ignoring wifi) whether you’ll see an improvement going from 15 to 50 is debatable, depending on which sites you tend to visit. A lot of times, the bottleneck is somewhere upstream of your ISP and out of your control. Places with huge amounts of bandwidth (youtube, amazon-hosted sites, etc.) might be faster, but a lot of other download sites, video sites, whatever – things that you’d use bandwidth for – won’t necessarily be able to fully utilize that kind of speed. What might be nice is that if you’re both using the bandwidth at the same time, there’ll be more of it to go around.