Harshal Vaidya wrote:

...

Most laptops here are sold with wifi 11b standards which are slow and outdated. Only toshiba and zenith have wifi 11g. That is almost 6 times faster and is now the standard in all laptops in western markets.

11b has a throughput of 11mbps which is more than enough for any broadband service which is operating in India currently. Moreover all 11g devices (of what I know) are all backward compatible to 11b.

Dont just think in terms of internet connectivity. Think enterprise and office environments. In office environment, 11mbps, shared between users makes it very slow. And if you put even one 11b pc in a 11g network, the entire traffic has to fall back to 11b. In effect, if you put a mix of 11b and 11g pcs on the same network, you actually endup with a 7-8mbps lan. Again this is shared bandwidth. Believe me, in a very short time on such a network, every one will be braying for your blood or putting up their hands in frustration. I have seen it happen at some client's office.

Some of the sysadmins in companies with 11g enterprise networks simply ask the wap to reject 11b connections without proper intimation.

The point is that if 11g is available why puchase a pc today that can only give 11b ? It comes back to the same old situation where foreign companies used to dump excess stock of unwanted technology expecting indians to lap it up. That has stopped with mainsteam infotech products since users are very aware of clockspeeds, but it is so easy to do it with wifi.