I’ve had an 802.11n router for quite some time now and recently purchased a laptop that has the Intel 5100 wireless adapter. Upon looking at the connection properties I’ve discovered that it was only connecting at 802.11g speeds (54Mbps).
After a bunch of troubleshooting, I discovered the solution: my wireless encryption setup doesn’t work under 802.11n. It appears that a device will not connect at the faster speed if you are using any form of TKIP encryption. Changing the encryption to AES solved the issue and now the router is connecting at the faster speed.
Intel has a document located at http://www.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/4965agn/sb/CS-025643.htm that explains this as well, but I thought I’d mention it in case anyone else is wondering why they can only connect to their wireless-N router at 54Mbps.
