A friend bought a Laptop from Dell, Inspiron N7110, and asked me to set up her wireless router. I was getting very poor speeds, and random disconnects. I did my own troubleshooting and found various posts where people found workarounds; disabling Bluetooth and N mode. Also installed the latest driver from Intel. The connection was still poor. I could get a decent connection if I was very close to the router, less than 15 ft. I called Dell, as she also bought Premium Support. After troubleshooting the connection and letting the Dell tech connect remotely to the laptop, I was told this specific adapter 1030 was a just a single band adapter and the working range was 10 to 15 feet!!!
I happened to have my Acer netbook with me and my connection was good and stable at 30 ft.( and probably further)
I couldn't believe what he told and asked to speak to a supervisor. He basically repeated the same thing and told me it wasn't Dell's fault, it was Intel's.
Hard to believe that my $250 netbook's wireless outperforms her $1300 laptop.
I realize it's difficult to give an exact range because of uncontrollable factors such as physical obstacles and interference from other routers, microwaves, cordless phones... but is possible to find an estimated range within Intel documentation? I looked and couldn't find anything.
