You are probably sitting there, staring at your old 802.11b/g 54mbit wireless router, and saying to yourself âThis just is that fast anymore!, with technology moving so fast, and this unit being so âoldâ now, why cant I upgrade!?â. Well now there is something on the horizon worth looking forward to.
Thanks to the good people over at Clearnet Communications (http://www.clearnet.com.au/) we have been sent two (yes 2!) Linksys WRT300N 802.11n Broadband routers.
Now just a note, the 802.11n standard, is still in draft and these units are based what is known as âDraft Nâ standard. So its not complete in terms of the software, and in the box, there is a signed letter from Cisco (Linksys parent company) stating what standards they applied to this firmware/hardware combination. The current draft is for a 300megabit connection speed, which should produce ~15mB/s of actual transfer speed, which happens to be faster than what 100mbit wired network can do, so when this specification is complete, you should see all units with gigabit Ethernet to be able to utilize all this bandwidth!
Alright, lets get into it!
Above: Hardware contents of the box. (Click to enlarge)
The item was a standard package, the router, power supply and a network cable. One thing you will notice though is the strange appearance of what looks like three antennas on this unit. This is where the 802.11n standard is quite different to that of the 802.11b and 802.11g sis called âMiMo Spatial Multiplexingâ. Now this on face value basically means, Multiple-In/Multiple-Out for better speeds. If you want to read up more on this visit our explanation on it at -> http://www.air-stream.org/mimo .
Above: The WRT300N.
Above: The front of the router. (Click to enlarge)
Above: Standard protocol for a router, 4 âLanâ Ethernet sockets and 1 âInternetâ Ethernet socket.
So we have our space-ship looking router, however we did not get sent an client PCI cards, so at first there was no way to test this allusive 802.11n. So we got to thinking, and within 20 minutes we had one of the units in parts, to determine if we could in fact use the MiniPCI card from within the unit, in a PCI cradle, to give us a client.
Above: First glimpse inside the unit. (Click to enlarge)
Above: Back of the Circuit board. Ooo look, a MiniPCI Card! (Click to enlarge)
Above: MiniPCI card in PCI Cradle.
As you can see, this MiniPCI card isnât so âMiniâ. Its approximately twice the height of a âstandardâ MiniPCI card.
Now, as this card utilises three antennas to achieve MiMo, I used the existing antennas that Linksys have mounted into the chassis of the WRT300N to ensure more accurate testing.
As for drivers, and workability, we had no clue on weather or not this would actually work. There are various revisions of MiniPCI and not all work in the PCI cradle, so everything was a gamble, and after it was plugged in and the computer started, we had lights! So a very promising start to an exciting benchmark.
Driversâ¦. You have to love them to hate them; however this is where we got stuck. It seems Linksys have two different chipsets, for two different countries. Now we had the UK version of the device, however I was not aware at the time that this should make any difference. So we spent around 20 hours trying to track down a driver set that would work with this card, until it was worked out that we needed the UK driver for the UK card. The US version is based on Broadcom chipset, where as the UK is based on Atheros. So, from what I have read of the forums around as well, if you are having trouble with driver sets for your cards, ensure you are using the correct region set of drivers, to give you the best head start.
So after a lot of stuffing around and frustration, we managed to get Windows XP to detect our wireless network.
One thing that was noticed is that when the AP had encryption enabled, the card would not connect at anything over 54mbps. Reguardless of the setup options, both on the card and in the router. So once encryption was disabled, we saw the magic number appear.
Speed: 300.0 Mbps. Yes thatâs right, youâre not reading it wrong. Once we saw this, we all got very excited. It was working!
So the question remained, how fast could it go?
Well, we decided to run a few tests, both with our new client, and also to see what the AP was capable of (seeing as it was supposably 802.11b/g backwards compatible!).
Now here is the test setup.
Client 1:
AMD 2600+ 512MB DDR400
Windows XP Professional Linksys WRT300N MiniPCI Card
MSI KM3M-V
Client 2:
650mhz Pentium III 256MB SDRam
Windows XP Professional Asus 120g (802.11g) WiFi
Seneo 200mW 11mbit MiniPCI
All tests were done, by pulling three 500MB test files from an FTP server on the network. Monitoring was done via the build in Windows XP Network monitor in Task Manager.
Results:
802.11b to 802.11n: This was assumed, 700kB/s transfer rate up and down.
802.11g to 802.11n: This actually surprised us, 3.1mB/s up and down, which is the maximum a 54mbit card can do. Normal 54mbit to 54mbit transfers top out at around 2mB/s.
Now just before we get to the N to N results, there is something to be noted. Initial tests were done at approximately 5m distance, as normal wireless works best at closer ranges, However the N to N was only achieving about 1mB/s, which was actually rather shocking. So we moved the units to about 10m apart, and amazingly the speed went up to around 6mB/s.(Woo Hoo! Its now twice as fast as 802.11g!). Although just walking around the room, or moving your hands near the units would change the speed very sharply. So after about 30minutes of playing with the three antennas, we managed to achieve a sustained throughput of 8.5mB/s! Amazing huh!.
Well, from the track record of increased distance = increased transfer rates, we moved the units about 25m apart from each other, and after some playing around, we were able to achieve 10.5mB/s solid for about 7 minutes.
One other thing to note here, after approximately 7minutes of the computer being on, windows seemed to ârejectâ the wireless card, and would stop functioning, slow right down, and all transfers would drop. So for a permanent solution, this cannot be done, and I would not assume any of this testing correlates to Linksysâs actual PCI 802.11n cards, as they are designed for being a client, unlike what we have done today.
So all in all, this is one impressive unit, yielding good results from the previous standards (802.11b and g) and even with the few teething problems we experienced, the 802.11n standard is looking to be a very impressive step forward.
So, once again thanks to Clearnet Communications for supplying these units for us to test.
Here are a few misc shots of the units and the testing that was done for the people playing at home (Click to enlarge):
Till next time, Keep on networking!
– Air-Stream: Adelaide Community Wireless.