5. Airgo Gen 3 Redux

The short story is that Netgear's new firmware had no effect and the RangeMax 240 is still a bad neighbor to nearby 802.11b and g WLANs using channel 6. Figures 7 and 8 show the results of uplink and downlink tests respectively.

Figure 7: Neighboring WLAN Test - Netgear RangeMax 240 (Airgo Gen 3) - uplink

The first half of the test lets the 11g WLAN get on the air first, with the second half letting the RangeMax 240 WLAN start first. In both cases and in both the uplink and downlink tests, whenever the Airgo Gen 3 based products are transmitting, the 11g WLAN essentially grinds to a halt. I also monitored the reported link rate in the client utility during the test and didn't see the rate drop to anything that indicated a shift down to 20 MHz operation.

Figure 8: Neighboring WLAN Test - Netgear RangeMax 240 (Airgo Gen 3) - downlink