High performance wireless is important in my house. For one, my desktop is located in a room at the opposite corner of the house from the cable modem and running an ethernet cable between the two is just not going to happen. This is the machine I’m likely to do all my gaming and large downloads on. This machine also runs my streaming media server having to pull media from a NAS and shoot it wirelessly to a media playback component hooked to my living room stereo. Even though the house is small and the locations probably not more than 60 feet apart, the neighborhood is dense with wireless traffic and my wireless performance never been great.
Over the past couple years I’ve gone through a series of upgrades. First, I switched our cordless phones to 5.8 GHz instead of the interference prone 2.4. Then not so long ago I upgraded my wireless router to a new Belkin N1 unit. Although reviews on the unit measure it to have mediocre range, the throughput is pretty respectable, and that’s what I need more than range. Still on the other end (my computer) I’ve been using a cheap D-link USB wireless G adapter. The switch to the new router definitely helped, but music dropouts and high game pings still occured more often than I’d like.
With this configuration I tried various internet speed tests and found about a 25% drop in download speed from being wired to the router to my wireless setup. For example, hitting a server in Chicago (which tends to be about the fastest regionally) I was getting 4.8Mbps down wired (which is about the Roadrunner cap), but only 3.7 wireless. Upload wasn’t affected since it’s capped at about .4 Mbps.
Monday I finally decided to replace the cheap G adapter and spring for an N1 PCI card which is the natural match to the router. I figured this would be as good as it could get for a while so I might as well try it; and if there wasn’t much difference I’d return the card.
After struggling a bit to install the drivers, I finally got it running, and the flood gates opened. Instead of detecting about 5 wireless networks I starting picking up about 22! Great, just more interefence I started thinking. I used Netstumbler to optimize the antenna placement, then went back to try the same online speed tests. This time I got exactly the same results as being wired to the router with a down throughput of 4.7 – 4.8 Mbps! I have yet to try streaming music or video, but things aready seem much improved!
I guess the moral is that unless all your components are on the same playing field you’re missing out on some of the goodness that you’ve paid for. It’s like buying a pretty HD-DVD player, but displaying it on a standard def TV.
Tags: Comp hardware / mods
