SmallNetBuilder

Introduction

If you've been following the saga of draft 802.11n, you know that most reviewers have said to hold off on purchasing products based on this draft standard. If that's all you want to know, then you can skip the rest of this article. But if you'd like to know more about whether these science experiments really deliver on their claims to expand both wireless speed and range, then stay right here.

I spent last week using an Azimuth Systems W-Series WLAN Test Platform to test three sets of draft 802.11n routers and CardBus cards for throughput vs. range performance. I also checked to see whether the products would behave more courteously toward an adjacent 802.11g WLAN than Netgear's RangeMax 240 that I tested back in January. The results were definitely eye-opening and may shake things up a bit among the draft 11n chip vendors and the consumer networking companies shipping these half-baked products.