A Network Performance Evaluation
George Schreyer Created 22 Aug 2004 Last Updated September 13, 2007
Introduction
I run mostly Apple Macintosh computers at my home and I use Apple's Airport series of networking devices along with a wired Ethernet network (mostly 100BaseT with one section running 1000BaseT). The Airport is a little more expensive than the PC flavor of network gear, but it's a lot easier to set up and integrates into an Apple environment better. Since Apple came out with the Airport Extreme wireless networking system, I've been slowly accumulating more Airport gear that supports Airport Extreme, or more generically,
802.11g.As of February 2007, Apple has introduced another version of the Airport Extreme, this one supports the 802.11n draft standard.
802.11n runs faster than 802.11g through the use of newer modulation schemes and a dual band approach combining 2.4 and 5 GHz wireless links. I just acquired and 802.11n version of the Airport, but I don't have any computers that use 802.11n so you won't see any wireless evaluations of this new hardware yet.As part of the process of equipment accumulation, I have been evaluating the performance of all of this gear. I generally find that the stuff meets its claims. However, the configuration of the network gear and the connections established have a great deal to do with wireless network performance too. It is these variations that I am interested in so that I can avoid the most disadvantaged configurations.
The original 802.11b WiFi standard supports data rates of up to 11 Mbits/sec under ideal (ideal=marketing) conditions. Conditions are rarely ideal. The rates usually obtained are about half the maximum rate. 802.11g supports rates of 54 Mbits/sec, or about 5x that of
802.11b and in real world usage, again the rates are about half of theoretical maximum. 802.11n is supposed to support rates of about 200 Mbits/sec.The first section of this page tests particular Airport network configurations. The second part tests wired and wireless networking between a set of computers with varying capability.
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