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If I use multiple wifi base stations on the same network will that improve the transfer speeds over just having the one.
EXAMPLE: I often use netflix on my laptop over wifi, but if I try transferring a large file while watching a movie, netflix will time out because my connection has slowed.
Will adding an additional wifi base station to my network improve LAN speed during high traffic?
If I use multiple wifi base stations on the same network will that improve the transfer speeds over just having the one.
You mean you're just seeing slowdown and what you're doing isn't typical network use? No. Your laptop will still only be talking to one base station at once.
Now if you actually mean "I have 60 machines connected to one station and we're all downloading files while watching netflix because that's just how we roll where I work" then yes, you're overloading the base station and should probably look at your network infrastructure some more (and probably move to wired connections, if that's really what you're doing, real world wireless simply isn't as good as those intel adverts with someone sitting in a field looking like downloading files from the web is the most exciting thing they ever did in their whole life).
As Robert Moir has pointed out it the issues with WLAN throughput are constrained by the efficiency of the channel between the WLAN client and the base station it is associated with, adding more WLAN infrastructure isn't going to help single user performance. It might be possible to construct a client with multiple WLAN adapters that connect to separate base stations but the usefulness of such a set up will be pretty minimal - you wont get better throughput unless you are using an application that can push data out multiple interfaces in parallel -standard downloads\file copies and the like aren't going to see any benefit.
The best solution to this is to invest in WLAN kit that can support multiple channels (well wider channels really), ideally MIMO 802.11n operating at 5Ghz. While some of these claim 450Mbps speeds the best I've seen in testing was a sustained 76Mbps with typical 802.11g WLAN throughput generally struggling to break through 20Mbps.
