wep and speed?

[get.Mos]

hello, perhaps this is a stupid question, so my apologies.

i have been trying to troubleshoot a wlan over a dsl connection. the systems have been sluggish and, in my presence, i have seen the connection drop.

since the clients have had minimal maintenance, i am currently taking steps to try to clean up each system, thereby (or hopefully) ruling out any client-side errors that may interfere with optimal packet transmission. however, i have one question re: wep encryption: does wep encryption affect speed?

thanks in advance.

[asitech]

Any encryption does affect the speed.

[oshea85]

Well, it actually depends on the wireless NICs used. Some cards perform WEP operations in hardware, while most do it in software.

But, even when it's done in software, the performance hit is around 10-20%. So, maybe you drop your actual throughput from 5.5 to 4 Mbps. You're DSL connection isn't that fast, so if your clients are mostly connecting to the Internet, it doesn't really matter what you're wireless speed is.

If your clients are sharing lots of files on the local LAN, it could make some difference, but I doubt your users would notice it, unless their using a stopwatch to time file transfers.