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In my house I have lots and lots of wireless devices for different things.  Hooked up to my TV in my living room is a Slingbox, AppleTV, Nintendo Wii, and my LG Blu-Ray player which can stream movies from Netflix.  I have other computers in the house that require wireless connections, webcam that stream video and a Nabaztag that is not really necessary, but is fun.  The issue is how to stream everything efficiently. 

I was originally using a Linksys WRT54G router, the Linux version, which would get up to 54 Mbps wirelessly, and two Linksys WET54G bridges to hook up devices that were not wireless.  The speed was good, but not great when streaming movies over the internet, especially if I was doing over wireless activities.  My router fried after 5 years of use, so I figured it was time to upgrade.  The newer routers on the market have the new standard of 802.11n, called Wireless N, which has speeds of almost 6 times that of Wireless G.  The next issue is whether I wanted to separate my media streaming from other activities, which I wanted.

I picked up the Linksys WRT610N, which is a dual band router.  I setup the Wireless N band at 5 GHz and the Wireless B/G at 2.4 GHz.  This allows me to pick if I need more speed for a connection of not.  I replaced one of my bridges with a Linksys WET610N bridge that will talk to the N band on my router.  I separated my streaming pieces and placed them on the Wireless N band and the rest, like my webcam and laptops on Wireless B.  The differences is outstanding.  When I was streaming from my Slingbox using Wireless B I was able to get around 2.4 MBps.  With Wireless N I am able to stream at over 8 MBps.  That is over 3 times the speed.  All Netflix streaming come up at full high definition now and there are no load times anymore.  And I am still able to do normal wireless interaction with my laptops and my webcams without any problems.

Wireless N is definitely the way to go whether streaming media or not.  The choice should be between dual band or single band N routers.