Performance

When buying a router, most of us are not concerned with performance. We value ease of use, stability and compatibility for home networking products. In other words, one does not want to spend a lot of time getting everything hooked up and set up, the network should run without interruption for long periods of time - no hang-ups, crashes or reboots of the hardware - and it should accept connections from various different vendors without problems. But as this is a 802.11n review, we want to give you some comparison numbers, so that you may get a feel for how your internal network should perform. Most of us with high-speed Internet have a faster network than what the ISP is capable of (some areas of the world excluded).

Upon first connecting to the network with the WN-5000PCI, I managed to run my network with a real 120 Mbit/s connection. This is up from around 35-40 Mbit/s of a 802.11g based network with the same position of the router and PC. I have two thick walls and around 10m between the workstation and VPN router. The downside of old buildings like mine are the very thick walls which carry the entire structure - these can be up to 70 cm or 27 inches thick. When setting the router to 802.11n (40 MHz), the WN-5000PCI managed to connect with the maximum of 270 Mbit/s right away. This means that this network has roughly 6-7x the bandwidth of a 802.11g network. Even with the WN-200USB, we managed to get a 135 Mbit/s connection, which translates to a 3-3.5x multiplier when compared to the 802.11g version.

To give you an idea about performance we simply set up an FTP server on the Workstation machine, connected with an FTP client to that Server on the exact same machine. Then a 1608 MB ZIP with no compression, containing small files between a few KB to a few MB was "downloaded" from the server. This ensures, that traffic actually passes through the router instead of looping back straight to the PC. To test the network behavior with small files, the exact files contained in the ZIP archive were used in the same manner.


As you can see, the actual bandwidth is smaller than what is mentioned in windows or the Airlive application. You will never get 100% of the advertised connection speed out of anything, due to the required overhead for any LAN or WAN. Considering the numbers above, just over 20% of the maximum available network bandwidth is lost due to that overhead. Still you can clearly see the difference between a traditional 54 Mbit/s "G" network and that of the "N" standard.