802.11n Draft 2.0 Benchmarking Revisited

Posted 10/17/2007 at 11:56am | by Michael Brown

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When I benchmarked five 802.11n Draft 2.0 wireless routers for Maximum PC’s November 2007 issue, I attributed the performance shortcomings of many of the routers to the harsh environment in which I tested them: a mid-rise office building in which numerous other wireless networks were also operating. I finished building my home in rural Northern California shortly after that, which I’ll now be using as a test lab for wireless networking products, media streamers, speakers, and similar products (I'm calling it Max PC Lab North). I recently retested each of those routers in that far quieter environment to see what would happen.

My home is located on 10 acres of what was once a dairy farm, so I don’t think my neighbors’ wireless networks—if they even had them—would interfere with mine. I expected to see a big leap in performance in this relatively RF-sterile environment. To my surprise, the numbers weren’t tremendously different.

I won’t make apples-to-apples comparisons to my in-the-office testing, because the environments are extremely different. The walls in the office environment contain metal studs and both the floor and the ceiling are concrete. The walls in my home contain wooden studs, the floor is concrete, but the ceiling was drywall. Radio signals don’t pass through concrete very effectively, so they could have bounced between the floor and the ceiling in the office environment. They might also have bounced off the metal studs to increase the signal’s range. And since the MIMO technology in the 802.11n standard takes advantage of reflected signals, this could have increased the router’s range. In order to make the comparison as meaningful as I could, I used the same benchmark utility in both tests; namely, Ixia’s QCheck.

At close range in my home-environment tests (five feet between the notebook and the router), Netgear’s WNR854T beat the stuffing out of the rest of the field, averaging 91.5Mb/sec. This didn’t surprise me, because it also performed well in my office test. Buffalo’s WZR2-G300N came in second place in the close-range test, delivering 66.7Mb/sec. But if your notebook is this close to the router, you might as well plug it in. The second test scenario is more meaningful, with the notebook in an adjacent room 20 feet from the router, and Netgear’s WNR854T was again the winner, delivering TCP throughput of 55.6Mb/sec.