Tony, your Microsoft article was awesome and beneficial. Didn’t quite understand the below though. We have AT&T Elite speed and wish we didn’t have to pay too much for a moderate speed. Does this apply to AT&T tech? What questions should we be asking? Thanks for information and we will keep your home page a favorite. Good luck!
802.11b is the most common type of wireless network, but 802.11g is about five times faster. 802.11g is backward-compatible with 802.11b, so you can still use any 802.11b equipment that you have. If you’re using 802.11b and you’re unhappy with the performance, consider replacing your router and network adapters with 802.11g-compatible equipment. If you’re buying new equipment, definitely choose 802.11g.
Hi, Jerry. Your wireless network–802.11b, 802.11g, or 802.11n, is your local area network (LAN). That works only inside your house–and the speeds of your wireless network only apply between computers in your house.
AT&T Elite is your DSL Internet connection. The speed of AT&T Elite determines how fast Web sites perform for you.
So, your connection is a bit like this:
Your computer -> wireless network -> AT&T Elite -> Internet
This might be a bit confusing because AT&T might be providing both the Internet connection and your wireless network. Regardless, their peformance is separate, and your Internet performance will be limited to the AT&T Elite speeds–6 Mbps (6000 Kbps) downloading information from Web sites, and 768 Kbps when uploading to the Web.
So, what questions should you be asking–just ask them to setup a wireless network for you. They will be happy to do this (I know, because I’ve had AT&T DSL before) but they’ll charge you. If you don’t mind some light network configuration (just following instructions), you could buy your own 802.11g or 802.11n wireless router from Amazon, TigerDirect, or an electronics store. I like Linksys, but just about any router will do the trick.
Hope that answers your question!
Actually AT&T had me change some settings and had me unplug certain things and replug them about 2 months ago and our computer crashed. We had an Dell XP which we never had to fix. They came out twice and then our computer did not want to work at all . We had that blue screen and we had to buy a new system, Windows 7. We refuse to compensate us at all and won’t return our calls. What do you recommend and what system do you use and who is your server? Our brother in law recommended we switch from wireless to wired to get a faster speed. Was that the wrong choice? Thanks Tony!
Hi again, Jerry, and thanks for following up.
I have a hard time blaming AT&T in this situation. There’s basically nothing your ISP could do that would cause your computer to blue screen. Well, I suppose it’s technically possible–they might have updated your network driver to something faulty–but that would have been difficult. Most likely, your Dell XP computer had some flakey piece of hardware or driver software, and AT&T’s involvement was coincidental.
I don’t work for AT&T, really!
I have two ISPs now: AT&T DSL and a Metrocast cable modem. Don’t take that as an endorsement; those are the only options I have in my area. The DSL is slow and Metrocast gives me far less bandwidth than I’m paying for.
If you have more options than I do, check out http://dslreports.com for reviews. You need reviews from people in your area anyway, because even within a big ISP, different regions are managed completely differently.
Good luck!