6. Performance

I've established five test locations around my home that I use for wireless product peformance testing. Since they represent places where one might want to place networked devices, I figured it would also be reasonable to use them for testing "alternative" networking products, such as HomePlug. Go here if you want the details on the locations and distances.

I used Ixia's IxChariot and set up two copies of the standard throughput.scr script to run simultaneously, one from the IxChariot console to a remote endpoint (for transmit), and the second with endpoints swapped (for receive). I used TCP/IP, changed the file size to 300,000 Bytes from the 100,000 Byte default, and set the scripts to loop for one minute. Note that I didn't mix products between manufacturers for the tests.

Figure 10: Throughput results
(click image to enlarge)

Figure 10 summarizes the total average throughput measured for the simultaneous receive and transmit tests in all five locations for the three manufacturers' products. You can see that best case average throughput of just under 25 Mbps was clocked for the NETGEAR XE104 pair for Location 1, which had both adapters plugged into outlets on the opposite sides of an approximately 13 ft. X 13 ft. room. This throughput is only about 30% of the 85Mbps prominently featured in the products' literature. Note that the difference between the NETGEAR and Actiontec results is about 5% and probably within the margin of error of my test methodology.

Figure 11 shows an IxChariot plot of the simultaneous receive and transmit runs so that you can see the throughput variation.

Figure 11: Location 1 NETGEAR throughput
(click image to enlarge)