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It’s difficult to find a level playing field for testing ADSL performance as many external factors come into play such as line contention, the levels of ISP services and the number of other users online at any given time.

As wireless plays a big part in this group test we opted to test raw throughput for 802.11g operations with the open-source Iometer utility which can measure transfer rates between two networked PCs. For our wireless client we used a Pentium III 800MHz notebook while a 1GHz Pentium III PC stood in as a LAN client and the latter was connected directly to each access point over Fast Ethernet. Both systems were installed with Windows XP Professional. The notebook was fitted with a Proxim ORiNOCO wireless PC Card which supports 802.11b, g and a operations and Iometer was configured with a transfer request size of 512bytes with 100 per cent sequential read operations.

Encryption overheads will have an impact on performance as do the distances from the wireless router so we devised six tests. At a distance of two metres in clear line of sight we tested with encryption switched off, 128bit WEP encryption selected and, where supported, WPA using a shared key with TKIP encryption. We then moved the laptop to a floor below the router at a direct distance of 10 metres with a two-layer wooden floor in between them and reran all three tests.

We had planned to use Proxim’s own wireless client software but found that a number of routers refused to work with it. Consequently we downloaded and applied Microsoft’s WPA Security update which provides support for WEP and WPA security.

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