5. MIMO To The Rescue?

Airgo's True MIMO appears to be the current high-bandwidth WLAN technology of choice, given the mess that its competitors have made of the whole draft 802.11n market. It's easy to see why Airgo is getting designed in, since its technology has good range vs. throughput performance without having to resort to havoc-wreaking channel bonding techniques. It also has reasonable interoperability with legacy 11b/g clients in mixed WLANs, although its throughput sharing tends to be better for downlink than uplink.

So I once again made a substitution on the "Neighbor" WLAN, bringing in a Belkin F5D8230-4 Wireless Pre-N Router and F5D8010 Wireless Pre-N Notebook Network card. I set the router into AP mode (using its handy built-in "Use as AP" feature) and installed the card into the Fujitsu notebook. The drivers and firmware haven't been updated in awhile, so the 1.01.03 firmware in the router and 1.2.0.80 driver for the card were still good to go.

Figure 13 shows plenty of bandwidth to handle both the IxChariot throughput script and the test video sent between the Belkin router and client. I even did a quick walk around both levels of my home with the video streaming and had only an occasional hiccup. Note that having the AP in the Guest room (my test Location 2) moved it closer to my normally troublesome test locations 4 and 5 and gave me whole-house streaming capability.

Figure 13: Shared data and video stream - Airgo True MIMO WLAN (click image to enlarge)

Having an Airgo-based WLAN (non Gen3) as a neighbor can be both good and bad news, however. If you can move off the channel that the Airgo WLAN is on, you'll never see it, since it achieves its high throughput and good range without using channel bonding. But if you have to battle it on the same channel for bandwidth, you're likely to lose since it competes fiercely as shown in Figure 14 and rendered the video unwatchable.

Figure 14: Linksys "Home" LAN video w/ Airgo "Neighbor" WLAN (click image to enlarge)