6. Broadcom Intensi-fi

I was hoping that the draft 11n folks would let Airgo take the "bad neighbor" rap all by itself for its Gen 3 chipset. After all, Airgo has consistently distanced itself from the draft 11n frenzy and what better way to really set its technology apart from the "mainstream" draft 11n activity.

Silly me! My testing showed that both Broadcom and Marvell haven't cracked the code on being neighborly. Figures 9 and 10 show uplink and downlink test results for the Netgear WNR834B RangeMax Next router and WN511B notebook card.

Figure 9: Neighboring WLAN Test - Netgear RangeMax Next (Broadcom Intensi-fi) - uplink

The results actually look hopeful, since the 11g WLAN seems to be getting a bit more air time and the Broadcom-powered pair seem to be trying to yield some throughput. But the plots actually look more like plain old competition for airtime, i.e. co-channel interference, that you see when two WLANs are trying to use the same channel.

I once again monitored the Netgear WN511B card's client utility during the test and didn't see any reported rates below 243 Mbps, i.e. channel bonded 40 MHz mode.

Figure 10: Neighboring WLAN Test - Netgear RangeMax Next (Broadcom Intensi-fi) - downlink