WEP vs WPA in terms of speed

Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (More info?)

The 3Mbit/s download speed is about as fast as it gets with cable modems.
802.11b can handle up to 11Mbit/s (although, real world numbers are about
half that) and 802.11g can handle up to 54Mbit/s. WEP and WPA encryption do
add a bit of overhead in terms of calculations needed to encrypt/decrypt but
do not have major impacts on performance.

Your main bottleneck is the cable modem (although, 3Mbit/s is much faster
than most DSL lines). An upgrade to 802.11g would only make sense if you
want to set up a LAN. Using either WEP or WPA will not slow things down
noticeably and you should use one of them.

-Yves

"Schizoid Man" <schiz@sf.com> wrote in message
news:cmdrbh$e06$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu...
> Hi,
>
> I am currently using 64-bit WEP and I clocked just north of 3000 kbps on
> the
> CNet Bandwidth Meter (my ISP is Comcast in San Francisco).
>
> I wonder how much faster this connection would be if I used WPA
> compression
> instead.
>
> Also, if I am using the generic Windows (I have XP Professional) drivers
> for
> my Wi-fi NIC (Linksys WPC-11), for networks that have other types of
> compression, I still get the message that the selected network has WEP
> compression when I click the 'View Available Wireless Networks' option.
> Any
> ideas?
>
> Anuj
>
> PS - Regarding my earlier problem (thread - 'I have an interesting
> problem'), it turns out that Windows XP does not accept a password for an
> encrypted network. It will only accept a key.
>
>