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WiFi Hardware Rules Of Thumb

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DaveMcLain

Regular Contributor
Tim,
I was just sort of wondering if it this would even be possible:

Is there any way to produce data that demonstrates to the wireless buyer the strengths and weaknesses of particular wifi hardware, how it copes with various real world wifi challenges? In other words do Broadcom chips tend to do better in high noise environments yet sacrifice range in quieter environments? Do Atheros chips tend to handle interference from other WLANs running in the area and still maintain reasonable amounts of throughput? Etc. Are there any rules of thumb that the wireless buyer could use to have some idea how a particular box may perform in a given environment?

The reason I'm wondering is because I just read a post where someone threw several competing products up and was wondering which was better for his home environment. Right now it's sort of read the chart, buy the box and take your chances.

Using my home as an example is not really helpful because I think of it as a very easy wifi environment. It's small, built of sticks and the neighboring WLANs are either quite weak signal wise or it's just easy to pick a channel that avoids them all together. This seems to bear out in that ALL the wireless products that I've experimented with have worked fine. WRT54G(several versions, firmwares and antennas), WGR614, DIR-655 and now over the last 7 months the WRT320N. All of these products gave similar performance for me here at home yet I'm entirely convinced that if I lived in a masonry home, an apartment building in the city or a much larger home that my results could have been much different.

Would it be possible to say, if you do some research on your particular wifi environment, find the strengths and weaknesses this or that box will most likely handle the situation the most easily, make sense?
 
If there is a practical way to do what you ask, Dave, I can't think of one. There are just too many variables involved.

I would like to provide something other than throughput to help readers select products. I toyed awhile back with creating a "quality" measure that combined throughput and throughput variation. This gave higher scores to products with low throughput variation. But, again, that's just one piece of the pie.

But the dirty little secret of Wi-Fi is that the client plays a big role in performance and reliability. Cellular networks have centralized command and control, but Wi-Fi leaves it up to the client to sort most of the decisions out about link rate, which AP to associate with, etc. APs can exert some control by limiting the # of clients connected and forcing maximum link rates. But clients play a big role.

And, oh yeah, the same wireless networking rules of thumb that I wrote years ago still hold:
1) It never goes as fast as they say it does
2) It never goes as far as they say it does
3) It never sets up as easily as they say it does
 
Wow cool stuff
 

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