Taking a Performance Hit

As you might have guessed, adding levels of encryption to your network
will ultimately reduce your overall bandwidth and slow down your wireless
connection speed. Even though WEP is considered a fairly efficient
means of adding encryption, it is important to quantify exactly what
that level of security is going to cost you in terms of speed.

 40-bit encryption reduces bandwidth by at least 1 Mbps
 128-bit encryption reduces bandwidth by nearly 2 Mbps

Even at full signal strength with speeds of 11 Mbps, you will notice
the drop in speed whenever you start transferring files, sending large
documents to your networked printer, or storing any large document on
a file server. In addition, when you are not at full signal strength and
you have already reduced speed throughput because of your distance from the wireless router, the performance hit becomes more obvious in
terms of how long it takes to transmit multimedia files or browse graphically
intense Web sites over the Internet.