Will Wireless "N" routers work for laptops with "g" adapters?

So basically, is it better to stick to 802.11g right now and upgrade to 802.11n when it becomes widely used?  Thanks for your help.  Niven

Is N better?

 

Since there is currently no N standard, in my opinion it is not better, since there is a potential for lots of incompatiblities, with different adapters and routers using different standards.  They all should, however, be backward compatible with 802.11g

 

Stronger? 

I'm not sure what you mean.

 

 

Faster?

 

Only for the connection between the computes on the local network.  It WILL NOT speed up your internet connection, since that is determined by your ISP.  Currently the fastest internet speeds offered are much less that 54 Mbps of 802.11g

 

Does it offer a wider range of coverage?

 

Yes, if all devices are the same 802.11N (that means they are all from the same manufacturer or at least follow the same non-standard), then they do offer wider range.

 

Steve

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@Niven13 wrote:
So basically, is it better to stick to 802.11g right now and upgrade to 802.11n when it becomes widely used?  Thanks for your help.  Niven

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Jumping to 802.11n might be the best thing for you, but then again it may not help or, at worst, might actually degrade the performance you see.  It all depends on what you are doing (lots of local data transfers, nothing but surfing the internet and doing email, etc) and what equipment you already have (one brand or many different brands of wireless cards/access point(s)).

 

If you need the faster connection between local machines, setting up a networking using all the same wireless cards (e.g., all Netgear or all Dell Wireless) can get you better speeds than 802.11g.  However, if you don't do large transfers on the local network regularly, or not very often, then you probably won't see much of a difference (if any at all) between an 802.11g and 802.11n network setup.

 

If you have a mixed environment you might be forced to use 802.11g connections anyway, even with all 802.11n hardware, due to the differences in implementation mentioned by Steve (the 802.11n standard hasn't been defined yet, so different companies have taken slightly different approaches).