WEP - performance hit?

I have seen no mesurable difference in performance from 64 bit to 256 bit WEP. Personally, I'd stick with the highest number your equipment supports. You'd be surprised about who's driving around or listening in from the neighborhood. I had a friend over and we were cruising around our neighborhood, it was amazing the number of unsecured wireless networks there were! We found 16 sites, and only two of them (mine was one) had WEP enabled.

there's no measurable difference between numbers of bits, but how about between WEP and no WEP?

I saw no difference there either, sorry I didn't make that clear.

I'm very new to wireless networking, but the instructions that came from linksys claim there will be a performance hit. How much, I dont know. Apparently by the other posts it isn't much.

Steve L

I've just discovered one of the FAQS on the Netgear (who make my router) site says enabling WEP will cause 40-60% loss of speed and range! This FAQ is linked from the support page for our router but the model numbers don't tie up so I'm not sure if it applies (hope not)

I'm tempted to set it up to restrict by MAC address instead and drop WEP, but I guess that would make the data vunerable to snooping still.

Also I'm having trouble with WEP passphrases in XP, help would be appreciated in
the new thread I've posted here

Obviously, Netgear didn't use enough processor in their wireless equipment.