OK.... I agree that gigabit ethernet is overkill, but utilizing a legacy 15 year old standard as the primary transport mechanism is a bit faulted, if you ask me....
802.11b has several issues, it uses the 2.4GHz band, as well as the original 802.11 standard and this may imply some difficulties, most and foremost with stability and reliability; this is an unregulated frequency band that many gadgets use, simply to lower cost. Using this unregulated frequency band means that your wi-fi is susceptible to intererence from a range of home appliances, microwave ovens, cordless phones and more...
I suggest that if you want wi-fi stability and reliability you should stay away from the 802.11a and 802.11b bands. I never made the wireless work well on the Squeezebox streamer that also uses 802.11b, probably because of the above stated reasons, so I always ended up using hardwired ethernet for this purpose (in this case 100base-t)