Misc Question about wireless throughput

RoyalTech

I have always wondered what the need for 802.11n is at 600Mbit/sec? I am current getting FiOS at my house and with my wired connection, I have gotten as high 3.1MB/sec which is 24Mbit/sec. That's not even close to what 802.11n is capable of. My only guess is to account for the signal weakening the farther away it gets or the more walls it has to get through and possibly the industry planning for advancements in the future.

Does anyone have any input on this? I'm just interested. No certification questions involved here.

paulgswanson

It's my understanding thats its not actually possible yet as current technology can't actualy transmit that yet. What I read and\or heard was "600Mbit/sec is the theoretical limit" I could be remembering old info though, can anyone else elaborate?

RoyalTech

I'm pretty sure that 600Mbit/sec is the theoretical limit but even if you were to get a fraction of that, it would be way higher than I get on FiOS which is pretty fast. If I'm correct, I've been seeing wireless routers that have made the claim of delivering the full 600Mbit/sec. Many are just 300Mbit/sec though.

Tackle

I hope I understand you correctly...

Yes, you most likely will not have 600Mbit internet connection for a long time.

But, if you want to transfer a file from one workstation to another on your LAN (Wireless or not), it will only go as fast as your slowest network device (whether it be a 100Mbit switch or nic, or the 600Mbit wireless). This goes for all traffic on your network, apart from the web.

1Gbit is pretty standard now for hardwire connection with 10Gbit on the horizon.

I've never been able to pull more than 150Mbit from my laptop wireless.

RoyalTech

What I'm getting off my FiOS at 3.1MB/sec is actually higher than they say they are providing as I'm getting the 20/5 service. With that, my max should be 2.5MB/sec. It was my understanding that FiOS was pretty fast and there wasn't many ISPs out there that were faster. At least for home networks. I could be totally misunderstanding this though. It just seems that the 802.11n standard is faster than anything out there even over a wired network and by far. The only reason I was wondering is since it is so much faster than anything out there for home networks, it seems kind of overkill to the max.

Aldur

Yes, if you actually were able to get 600 mbps over a wireless network than that is overkill in relation to any internet connection, however, in the same vein, so is a typical fast Ethernet home network.

Where getting 600 mbps would be nice is for LAN transfers in which you're using 1 Gbps wired connections throughout your home network. This would allow you to get some pretty impressive transfer rates across your wireless home network.

Also, along the lines of you only getting 24 mbps, are you sure you have a 801.11n wireless card in your laptop? And if so, is your wireless router running in 801.11n mode? And if the two previous answers are yes, are all the wireless devices in your house running 802.11n, including any smartphones? That last question's relevance will depend on if your wireless router is capable of running dual bands. Also, what are you connecting to when testing your speed? If you are just downloading a file on the Internet, you could be getting rate limited on the server side.

Priston

I would imagine it only supports 600 mbps running on dual-band. 300mbps on 2.4GHz and 300 mbps on 5GHz

Which is why it's only saying you have 300mbps.

RoyalTech

Aldur wrote: »

Yes, if you actually were able to get 600 mbps over a wireless network than that is overkill in relation to any internet connection, however, in the same vein, so is a typical fast Ethernet home network.

Where getting 600 mbps would be nice is for LAN transfers in which you're using 1 Gbps wired connections throughout your home network. This would allow you to get some pretty impressive transfer rates across your wireless home network.

Also, along the lines of you only getting 24 mbps, are you sure you have a 801.11n wireless card in your laptop? And if so, is your wireless router running in 801.11n mode? And if the two previous answers are yes, are all the wireless devices in your house running 802.11n, including any smartphones? That last question's relevance will depend on if your wireless router is capable of running dual bands. Also, what are you connecting to when testing your speed? If you are just downloading a file on the Internet, you could be getting rate limited on the server side.

This was purely an FYI type of question. I am not even running 802.11n devices at the moment. I was also thinking in terms of the internet and how 802.11n matched up against what the ISPs provide. I've also thought about it in terms of Cat5e and Cat6 as well like you mentioned. The speed numbers that I mentioned I was getting on an ethernet connection are simply the fastest download speeds I've seen on my connection which usually come from Microsoft downloads. On my laptop I get about 1MBps with a wireless connection using my current devices.

I'm not sure how it would matter even if you were transferring files though because I actually can download from the internet at faster speeds than I can move a file to another location on the same computer. That's probably the one Windows thing that annoys me more than any other including UAC.

Forsaken_GA

Well, file transfers can be a finicky thing, as you get the speed of the spindles involved, as well as I/O overhead from the OS. This is why I prefer to use a dedicated bandwidth testing util that doesn't involve disk I/O. I've gotten 240 Mb/s transfer rates on iperf with my mac book pro through an Apple Airport Extreme, but the MBP was about 5 feet away from the AP.

Personally speaking, I prefer wired connections whenever I can get them. Wireless is a convenience option for me, not a performance one, and I readily accept that I'm making a tradeoff in throughput for mobility. Most of the time, that doesn't matter.

NetworkEnchanter

I have always wondered what the need for 802.11n is at 600Mbit/sec? I am current getting FiOS at my house and with my wired connection, I have gotten as high 3.1MB/sec which is 24Mbit/sec.. It just seems that the 802.11n standard is faster than anything out there even over a wired network and by far.

In reality, you don't get 600Mbps. It's like DSL.. as you add more feet (and walls) between you and your access point, the speed drops off dramatically. 50Mbps to 100Mbps is more typical. That may sound fast, but once you begin to take advantage of it by transferring high-quality multimedia, it's not so fast.

RoyalTech

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Well, file transfers can be a finicky thing, as you get the speed of the spindles involved, as well as I/O overhead from the OS. This is why I prefer to use a dedicated bandwidth testing util that doesn't involve disk I/O. I've gotten 240 Mb/s transfer rates on iperf with my mac book pro through an Apple Airport Extreme, but the MBP was about 5 feet away from the AP.

Personally speaking, I prefer wired connections whenever I can get them. Wireless is a convenience option for me, not a performance one, and I readily accept that I'm making a tradeoff in throughput for mobility. Most of the time, that doesn't matter.

I'm the same way concerning wireless and wired. My desktop is wired and my laptop is wireless. In order to give my desktop a wired connection, I had to place the wireless router in a less that optimal location.

With the topic of file transfers, does it really matter what the actual throughput is if you can only get it by using a special util? I am not familiar with spindles other than I've heard of the term. I have read about the I/O overhead regarding Windows when it comes to file transfers though. I just don't remember exactly what that overhead involved.