Wireless Performance
NOTES:
• Signal Quality readings in the table above are not valid. No signal quality readings were available via the WinXP monitoring application.
• Testing was done with a Linksys WPC54G Cardbus client card in a WinXP Home Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop, unless otherwise noted.
So as to not be accused of playing favorites, I gave the Linksys products as thorough a going-over as I did BuffaloTech's, and I'll be making a number of comparisons between the two as I go along. I also gave Linksys a heads-up on my findings and had an informative conversation with the Wireless-G line's product manager, who confirmed my findings and explained the reasons for much of what I was seeing.
I first wanted to see if Linksys suffered from the same "throughput hopping" behavior that I had seen with the BuffaloTech products. So I again made sure that the only wireless equipment powered up was the WAP54G and WPC54G client. I then ran the NetIQ Chariot throughput.scr script for about 20 minutes, modifying only the file_size parameter to use a 200,000 Byte file size, instead of the default 100,000 Bytes for each transfer. Figure 6 shows the result.
Figure 6: Long throughput test
(click on the image for a full-sized view)
When compared with the BuffaloTech plot, the Linksys's throughput variation looks to be smoothed considerably, but has approximately the same 14Mbps average throughput. It also seems that the Linksys doesn't reach the same >20Mbps throughput peaks, but I'll have more on that later.