802.11n-Router Roundup

Zitat

For my 802.11g comparisons, I ran throughput tests on my Linksys WRT54G router so that I had an idea of the throughput that one of the most popular wireless-g routers offers in comparison to each of the wireless-n routers in the roundup.

I switched the Apple Extreme to 5GHz mode. Inside the house, I saw an immediate boost in throughput speeds.

The UDP numbers were so slow that I thought I'd made a mistake. I double-checked to see that my router was set to broadcast at "up to 270Mbps," and found that it was, so for kicks and as an attempt to find a solution, I threw the Linksys notebook adapter into my notebook and began testing the router with that.

The box that the DIR-655 came in has a subsection that says something along the lines of "Add more to your network," with one of the subcategories being "Storage." This advertisement paired with the USB port could really lead consumers into believing that they could add a hard drive to the router. They cannot.

I contacted Linksys for more information about why UDP numbers were lower in 802.11n routers. "In 802.11g , the overall throughput is much lower so you probably can't tell a difference between UDP and TCP, even if UDP loses some packets. But in 802.11n, the overall throughput is much higher, and the packet loss in UDP due to the interference will be much more pronounced," said a Linksys engineer. "If the environment is clean with no interference, UDP throughput in 802.11n should be higher than TCP because UDP doesn't have as much packet overhead as TCP."