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Home arrow Wireless arrow Wireless Features arrow Does HomePlug AV + 802.11g equal Wi-Fi Nirvana?
Does HomePlug AV + 802.11g equal Wi-Fi Nirvana? Print E-mail
Tim Higgins   
February 25, 2008

Introduction

It was last July (2007) that Zyxel first pitched me on its NBG318S combination 802.11g (actually 108 Mbps Atheros "Super G") router with built-in Homeplug AV bridge. Having experienced low interest in powerline networking articles in general, however, and with plenty to do with the restart of draft 802.11n reviews, I passed.

But when Zyxel pitched the router again in November, I changed my mind. By then, I had tested about a half dozen 802.11n Draft 2.0 routers and discovered nothing really miraculous in terms of range extension.

I had found that draft 11n routers have 3 to 3.5X the throughput of 802.11g routers with close range in the 2.4 GHz band and in their out-of-the-box 20 MHZ bandwidth mode (60 - 70 Mbps vs. 19 - 23 Mbps).

But once draft 11n products got past the "waterfall" part of their throughput vs. path loss curves, throughput dropped down to look very similar to 11g products. I also found that draft 11n products disconnected at pretty much the same signal levels as 11g products. Figure 1 illustrates this, comparing two draft 11n (WRT350N and DIR-655), one 11g (WBR-2310) and one "Super G" (DGL-4300) routers.

Downlink Throughput comparison, 11g, Super G and draft 11n routers

Figure 1: Downlink Throughput comparison, 11g, Super G and draft 11n routers

You can see that the curves all end within 3 dB of Path Loss of each other. And the Super G router even beats one of the draft 11n routers toward the end of its performance curve.

So the question I wanted to answer with the NBG318S was whether using it, and its companion PLA450 HomePlug AV Powerline Wireless Access Point, could provide better performance at my home's hard-to-reach spots than a draft 11n router and card.



Tags: HomePlug, powerline, WiFi, ZyXEL,

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