Lately I’ve been examining the actual performance charastics of wireless networking devices.

I recently purchased a  Netgear WNR3500, and testing with iperf tells me that I see a maximum of 35Mbit/s. Many commenters have written in to ask me to try forcing the 802.11 connection to 802.11g, so I did that by installing my older Apple Airport Extreme (snow) base station.

Performance on that device is even worse:

dhcp-102:iperf-2.0.4 jna$ src/iperf -w256k -c 10.1.1.15
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.1.1.15, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:   257 KByte (WARNING: requested   256 KByte)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.1.1.102 port 54575 connected with 10.1.1.15 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.1 sec  20.5 MBytes  17.0 Mbits/sec

Wireless speeds just don’t compared to wired! I’ve yet to see anything come close to 100mbit/sec, but 802.11N (draft standard 4) is much faster, by a factor of two.