The details are at the following posting thread. Basically, I used YaST to set up the wireless interface and used Network Manager to run the wireless link. But the Bit Rate of the wireless interface was only 1Mb/s whereas I was getting 4Mb/s on the ethernet link to the ADSL router. Using iwconfig to report and change the bit rate was the answer.
Fast Ethernet, but slow wireless - openSUSE Forums
Now that’s perfect timing! I just finshed installing openSUSE 11.1 on my main desktop that has a Realtek RaLink RT2500 802.11g installed.
When doing some updates I noticed the crawl…
I open up the forums to see if there is any report of this… and voila, your post is sitting on top 
In my case ’ iwlist scanning ’ reported a max bit rate of 48M.
Setting it with ’ iwconfig wlan0 rate 48M ’ made it jump back up to 48M.
Although 54M is not listed as supported rate, I can set it and it will be applied within 30 seconds.
The auto function (iwconfig wlan rate auto) seems broken when using the card. I don’t have the issue on my other two wireless systems?
As you are also using a Realteck I’m guessing it’s a driver issue.
Cheers,
Wj
p.s. Seems we will have to apply the rate setting after each reboot until a fix is known…
Oh, the iwconfig doesn’t make a permanent change it seems. So to keep the settings between reboots, you need to update the setting permanently in the appropriate config file as root. In my case, the config file is:
/etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0
where I updated the line:
WIRELESS_BITRATE=‘auto’
to read:
WIRELESS_BITRATE=‘6M’
ignore previous post #3]. Something else is at work and it ain’t my brain Will hunt down the proper answer and post it. Hopefully a mod/admin will delete these two posts to avoid future confusion.
Wow - Sometimes the search is really helpful!!! 
Thanks this solved my headache!!! 14M internet is definitely better than 1M…^^