I often shoot in a studio setting. I often shoot tethered to the laptop. At any point in time I am most certainly streaming radio through the laptop to keep the mood in the studio, have e-mail constantly checking, uploading files through You-Send-It to an off-site creative director, and backing up files to the server as they are being shot. The files are 24 MB raw files and sometimes I'll pop off a burst of five frames a second if I'm shooting with the Canon. The file size increases to 39 MB if we are shooting with the Hasselblad.

The e-mail, internet radio, and file uploads tax the T-1 line without the internetwork burden of the heavy lifting tacked on top. Before we switched the studio to 'N' standard, we would occasionally get gridlock and corrupted files if we shot a big burst. Even this week when transferring files from an older laptop to a newer, it was going to take three hours to transfer the shoot backup using the older wireless G. Dumping the files onto a firewire backup drive (37 minutes), getting access to the CubeStation and freeing up a port (5-10 minutes), and dumping the files directly through firewire again (37 minutes) saved an hour and a half. Had I had the newer laptop I would have just done the wireless transfer which normally takes about an hour and a half for a shoot.

When we do a 12 hour shoot, it is not uncommon to blow through 30 - 40 GB of storage before transfers into .tiff format or PS editing.

Then again, my situation is not normal. Most people probably don't need that much local bandwidth.

One more thing, I get better reception with the 'N' router. We haven't done a shoot outside since installing the new standard in the studio, but I've tested the connection and still getting full bars at about 75'-100'. We were never able to get a consistent signal from the old Linksys. I'll let you know in the spring.