On Jan 17, 2008, at 4:24 AM, Peter Teunissen wrote:
I have no experience with wifi range extenders but it seems to me it should really just 'resend' the signal. If the extender is a 802.11g device, I'd expect it to produce the same throughput as the original source.
When dealing with a half-duplex broadcast network like this, it's helpful to think of bandwidth in terms of time. A range extender has to take the time to listen to a packet, then it has to take the same amount of time to transmit that packet. (In a half-duplex network you can't talk and listen at the same time.) So it takes twice as much time to send a packet through a range extender as it does to send it direct. This halves the available bandwidth.
Likewise, copying from a wireless device to another wireless device, through an access point, gives you half the bandwidth you'd get going from a wireless device to a wired device; the access point has to listen to each packet, then resend it.
This is also why having 802.11b devices on an 802.11b/g network tends to lower throughput dramatically; the b packets take up more airtime, leaving less bandwidth available.