6. Test Results

I tested voice quality by making a number of outgoing calls and receiving a few and experienced no problems with either call completion or intelligibility on either side of the connection. I even used the Bandwidth Saver feature to crank down to 30 kbps and, aside from some "scratchiness" in the connection, found call quality to be satisfactory.

I unfortunately wasn't able to run a TestYourVoip.com Golden Phone test, since the service has been temporarily suspended. So I had to resort to some informal "can you hear me ok?" testing, which, again, surfaced no serious complaints.

I tested the phone's range by dialing into voicemail to listen to a stored message while walking all over my two-level 3,000+ square foot home. The base station was located in my corner-location, lower-level office which, due to my home's hillside construction, is really not a "basement" office and has daylight exposure.

Reception was just dandy in all locations and it wasn't until I walked out into a garage that is 15 feet away from the house and diagonally opposite and above my office that I started to hear some breakup in the recorded message.

While I had the BTS on the test bench I decided to check its routing performance. LAN to WAN throughput was between 60 - 61 Mbps with ping time of 1mS - as low as Qcheck measures. WAN to LAN throughput averaged between 56 - 57 Mbps with ping times again at 1mS. So it doesn't look like the BTS' router will be the limiting factor in any Internet connection consumers are likely to have.

I also checked to see whether the BTS would step on a 2.4 GHz LAN, since it actually transmits and receives in both the 5.8 and 2.4 GHz bands. I first confirmed that the BTS does indeed use both bands by using Cognio's ISMS Mobile 1.0 Spectrum Analyzer. Cognio is the OEM for the AirMagnet Spectrum Analyzer that I previously reviewed and has loaned a unit for long-term use.