I am thinking about getting verizon fios & they are touting 20mbps transfer rates. Will you average network card/ desktop computer/ wireless laptop handle theses kind of speeds?

Absolutely. You'll not see any broadband traffic exceed the speed your standard 100Mb network card can't handle anytime soon.

As said ,most cards are 100/1000MB and your not going to get close to exceeding that.

The speed bottleneck isn't going to be your network card. When you transfer data, it has to go somewhere. The first place it should go is to your RAM which even faster than the network so you are OK there, but the problem with RAM is that only a very small portion of it will be available at any time for storage of the data, and when it fills up, you hit the bottleneck. It has to be cached on your drive and drives aren't as fast as the other devices.

The speed bottleneck isn't going to be your network card. When you transfer data, it has to go somewhere. The first place it should go is to your RAM which even faster than the network so you are OK there, but the problem with RAM is that only a very small portion of it will be available at any time for storage of the data, and when it fills up, you hit the bottleneck. It has to be cached on your drive and drives aren't as fast as the other devices.

True, they aren't as fast, but still no where near as slow as FIOS's fastest transfer speed. The only thing that would really make that truly a bottleneck would be if he's running enough applications (open and background apps) to make his really HDD crawl.

No problem, you won't see 100mb speeds from home at least. You are good to go.

Big D

I have FiOS and have never quite seen 20 on a speed test. 14-16 is usual.

thanks guys!