Router question

[Rob52240]

Your service provider must have competition?

[SectorNine50]

Your service provider must have competition?

In my area, no unfortunately.  We are basically at the whim of Comcast here.  The good news is that the service has been pretty good for the past few years.  Are you sure you aren't confusing Mbps (megabits per second) with MB/s (megabytes per second)?  Advertised speeds for ISPs need to be divided by 8 to be converted to kilobytes/megabytes, which is what our browsers report download speeds at.

[Tigger29]

For the VAST MAJORITY of users (and if you aren't one of them you already know this) internet speeds don't even come close to network adapter speeds.  I see people all the time wanting to upgrade their equipment from 10 to 100 to 1000.. or from B to G to N but the truth of it is that it doesn't really do much.

Even a 20Mbps (Megabit per second) internet connection doesn't even come close to touching the old 10 MB/S (MegaBYTE per second) network standards.  Keep in mind that there are eight bits to a byte which means that internet speed is really only 2.5MB/S (but most likely you'll be using much less anyway).

Now for transferring data from one computer to another in your network is a different story by most people don't even do this much less need the extra speed to do so with.

[bbosen]

...Even a 20Mbps (Megabit per second) internet connection doesn't even come close to touching the old 10 MB/S (MegaBYTE per second) network standards.  Keep in mind that there are eight bits to a byte which means that internet speed is really only 2.5MB/S (but most likely you'll be using much less anyway).

Now for transferring data from one computer to another in your network is a different story by most people don't even do this much less need the extra speed to do so with.

Close. Us old-timers will remember that the "old 10 MB/S" Ethernet was actually 10 MegaBIT/S" (not Bytes). But that doesn't really change Tigger's main point. For the VAST Majority, even the oldest LAN adapter is much faster than their Internet adapter, so buying a faster LAN adapter isn't going to help Internet speeds. But that didn't help my Internet speeds one bit.

In my case I have a huge library of (legally purchased) movies on a shared network server, and I can watch them on any of the TVs or PCs spread all throughout my house. THAT is a situation that benefits greatly from a fast LAN, so I have abandoned all of the oldest, slowest LAN adapters in favor of faster stuff.