Wireless N Speeds

[NizmoZ]

I have been trying to read through articles online about wireless speeds, but there seems to be conflicting information.

-You have a Wireless N router, dual band, 3x3 antenna (E4200v2 in this case).
-Your desktop has a PCIe 450Mbps card, connected to 5GHz and reporting 450Mbps speeds in windows (and bandwidth tested to be around 90-110 Mbps real measurements).
-You have other N devices with 1 and 2 antennas that connect at 65-217Mbps

Questions:

1. If those 1 antenna devices connect, does it slow your bandwidth down going to your 450Mbps devices? At one point, I remember it being an issue with Wireless B and G clients on one AP...

2. If I added an E3000 in ethernet bridged mode (TomatoUSB) to the 5GHz channel, would it get the actual 300Mbps attached to the E4200 since it has 3x3 antenna? How would you verify the connection speed the bridge is getting? If I did this, would it slow down my desktop connected at 450Mbps?

 

[thiggins]

As long as all devices support 802.11n, devices with slower link rates will not affect devices with faster link rates. All devices connected to the same radio will share bandwidth, of course.

The reason why b devices slowed G and B/G slow N is that the older standard devices can't detect the newer standard devices when they communicate at higher speed. So the faster devices must slow down for the slower devices so that communication can be properly coordinated.

For your second question, a two stream device connected to a three stream AP/router should be able to connect at its maximum link rate (depending, of course on its settings and the AP/router settings).

If Tomato doesn't report the link rate, you have no way of knowing.

 

[NizmoZ]

Thanks for the answers.

The E3000 has 3x3 antenna, so I think that it'll make a good bridge connection to my E4200v2. It should provide a great media connection point for my entertainment center 1 floor up.

If I wanted to test the E3000 bridge speed, I could install bandwidth monitoring onto a laptop wired up to the E3000. Then install the other end of monitoring app onto the desktop hooked to my E4200v2. Since I already know what 450Mbps gets me in real world numbers, I am guessing that 300Mbps of the E3000 would get about 75Mbps real world traffic.

Does a bridge introduce any traffic slowdown as far as duplex or decreases in throughput? Or does it function just like a device with 3 antennas connected to your wirless network would, then just feeds it's wired ports that information?

 

[tipstir]

G54 vs N150 vs N300 on the same network these N150 devices are slow poke. G54 on the same system with N300 really don't see much changes except for some hardware repeaters that are suppose to be N300 are more like N144 and N300 are N214. Case in point E4200V1 and EA4500 operating in mix mode shows these results. Switch to ESR600H the same results show N300 in mix mode.

Ran N300 801.11n 20_40HT on laptop running Winodws 7 64-bit Dual Core 2.0GHz 4GB DDR3 with array ANT and got downloads of 31mbps from WAN to LAN.

Ran N150 802.11n 20_40HT on tablet running Windows 7 64-bit Dual core 1.5GHz 2GB DDR3 and got 15mbps from WAN to LAN.

Ran G54 802.11g 20HT on tablet running Android Ice Cream 4 32-bit single core 1.1GHz OC 1008MHz 1GB DDR3 and got burst range 22mbps then 14.85mbps download from WAN to LAN. This is only available with my Power 54 G+ Code.

Results are mixed as you can see using Mix mode on master AP.