Wireless, how slow can it be?

I’ve just been hooked up to the BT Infinity 40Mbps broadband service after spending almost a decade stuck with 2Mbps ADSL. So while testing my new broadband on www.speedtest.net I found that I wasn’t getting the full 40Mbps.  Soon identified my wireless network to be the culprit, it struggled to get anywhere near as fast as the new Internet link. When I moved my laptop further away from the Wireless router performance seriously dropped to around half line speed. Conversely, when hooked up via LAN cable, the speed was about the 40Mbps I’d expected.

Thinking perhaps my laptop was past its best I set about checking the wireless performance of a selection of laptops, netbooks, I Phones – pretty much anything with a wireless capability really, from various points around the house. Well turns out my laptop is fine but wireless kind of sucks J

This table shows the performance I measured over my wireless network for the selection of devices and locations in my home.

You can see the max speed for my Internet line is 37.65 Mbps (down). Once you add wireless into the mix it gets nasty. Look at the I-phone 3GS – 15Mbps max and that’s when its 12” from the wireless router. 1^st gen Touch I can kind of forgive but 6Mbps is pretty slow by my new standards. The Thinkpad I thought might be getting old turns out to have by far the best wireless connection – who knew.

So it’s pretty clear to me that:

• Wireless is great for flexibility but sucks for raw performance
• As a rule of thumb I cant expect to get much more than 20Mb from the Internet if I connect via wireless and probably a hell of a lot less (ignoring same room, I’d use Ethernet in that instance anyway)
• I can get downloads at least twice as fast by using cable into the hub rather than wireless.

The Lab

Whilst this isn’t a laboratory environment by any stretch of the imagination I should explain my test “environment” aka my home. Firstly I picked 4 “distant” locations in the home at which to perform the tests. These where:

1.      Study, on my desk ,12 to 18 inches from the AP router

2.      Far end of the lounge, this is across a hallway from the Study, about 12m from the AP

3.      Bedroom 1 3m elevated and 12m from AP, above Lounge

4.      Bedroom 2 3m elevated and 10m back from AP

At each test location I used the local browser (mostly ie8) to access www.speedtest.net and performed a speedtest to the recommended test server (Milton Keynes – my home city). For the apple devices the speedtest app was used instead. All NICs where set for auto speed though clearly some aren’t capable of N rates. As the AP remains constant the only other major variable is the wireless capability on the relevant laptop.  No attempt was made to run latest drivers, this was purely a "suck it and see" test.

Next

I’m going to check out my other two wireless routers to see if they are any better than the BT Home Hub