Wireless Reviews

Mixed STAs

The Vision's performance with a mix of draft 11n and 11g clients was similar to that of previously tested products. I set up my usual test using a second notebook with a Linksys WPC54G V3 11b/g card (Broadcom chipset). Both it and the Fujitsu notebook with F5D8011 V3000 card were associated with the Vision, which was set to its 20 MHz Channel mode, to simulate what should be its proper "out of the box" settings.

I then ran two IxChariot throughput.scr streams, alternating the STA that got on the air first. Figure 18 shows how uplink throughput was shared when the 11n pair started first, while Figure 19 shows the 11g pair starting first.

Figure 18: Mixed 11n, 11g STAs - Uplink, N starts first

The results follow the same pattern that I've seen with other draft 11n products, i.e. the 11g STA gets knocked down to 11b speeds. In this case the 11g throughput is knocked down to a little under 6 Mbps. The 11n pair also gets a throughput hit, but still manages to average around 33 Mbps when the 11g STA is on the air.

Figure 19: Mixed 11n, 11g STAs - Uplink, G starts first

Mixed performance in downlink was essentially the same as uplink.