And you'd be surprised at the number of building materials that can make a house into a pseudo-faraday cage. In term of the "communicate at the lowest speed", there is an issue that used to affect 802.11 (and may still on the newer standards???), but APs used to function more like a hub than a switch, in the sense that all bandwidth was shared. So there would be a bottleneck there. What I don't know is if they act like USB hubs used to (think is fixed in 3.0??) and drop all communication to least common denominator. If so, that makes that 1.0 mbps you spoke of even more painful. Fairly certain all modern gear doesn't, but we were talking about ppl on older hardware...