The Price

$149.95 RRP in Australia

The Verdict

If you upgrade to the new Xbox 360 Wireless Adaptor from the old, 802.11g version, you won’t notice any difference while gaming. But media streaming over your home network will see a legitimate speed increase.

For a moment, let’s ignore Microsoft’s traditionally ridiculous price for their Xbox 360 Wi-Fi adaptors. Instead, let’s just focus on performance.

Upgrading from 802.11g networking to 802.11n has a few key advantages: range is longer, speeds are faster and, since 802.11n sits on the 5GHz band, you won’t interfere as much with 2.4GHz frequencies used by 802.11g and basically everything else in existence.

But there’s one big thing that stops 802.11n from being any better than 802.11g for gaming: latency. Overall throughput may be faster on 802.11n (the pipe is bigger), but latency is really no less present than on 802.11g (it takes just as long for that first burst of water to come through). So those quick gaming commands aren’t faster on n, and my multiplayer testing (Modern Warfare 2 and Borderlands… it was a real chore) confirmed it.

Media streaming, however, is where those big throughputs pay off. Using Connect360, I streamed HD episodes of Mad Men from my Mac to the Xbox. I timed from the moment I hit play to to the first frame of video playback. And the difference was noticeable.

Buffering occurred between 2-3 times faster, which was well beyond my expectations, despite how fast 802.11n is on a spec sheet. Clips went from taking as many as 15 seconds to playing (rounding up) to actually breaking the five-second barrier. I’d love to have tested 1080p streaming over Live as well, but my DSL is the bottleneck in that scenario.

Yes, the Xbox 360 Wireless Adaptor is still profanely expensive. No, if you have an older adaptor (or you’re just using some other solution), I wouldn’t recommend the upgrade (nor do I think Microsoft is even marketing it that way). But it’s nice to see a tangible improvement all the same.

Streams intra network media between 2-3 times faster

Tiny form factor still unique to the industry

No perceivable speed increase in gaming

It’s $149.95.

Costs half the price of a new 360

It’ll set you back a month of dinners at McDonald’s.

I don’t even want to think about what that is in White Castles

That’s a fucking absurd number. You could almost wire your house with Ethernet cable for that amount. In fact, I’ll probably do that rather than pay $150.

Don’t get me wrong – I love my Xbox… It still hasn’t red ringed, and there are some great games out now and on the way. But $150 for wireless – that should be included with the hardware – is just absurd… Although it always has been – the current G adaptor costs the same amount…

[Microsoft]

After all, Roku players only stream media from a handful of sources while an HTPC opens up the entire internet for playback on a TV. Plus, nettops and other small PCs are becoming extremely affordable. Unless the XR costs next to nothing, it makes more sense to save up for an HTPC. In the end, you might recoup the added expense by ditching your cable service. [Engadget]

Indeed, having Linux on the RangeMax right from the start means you can load unofficial firmware on the router out of the box. And the USB port means you can also set it up as a media server. Other features include a 480MHz MIPS processor with 8MB of flash and 64MB of RAM. Expect the WNR3500L to ship sometime this fall for $US140. [Netgear via Electronista]

It seems funny to me that wireless N is finally coming around despite the fact that I have been using it for years. But what about you? What Wi-Fi standard do you use at home?