Netgear WNDR 3300

I’m explaining my wireless testing in detail with this post so I can abbreviate more and hopefully make it quicker to write up product reviews later on.  After installing the wireless router and adapter, the main way I test is to do lots of file copies between my test machine and a file server directly attached to the wireless router. I copy the same amount of data each test pass,  so I just have to measure how long it takes,  and do some basic math to arrive at the effective throughput in millions of bits per second (Mbps).    

My server is a fairly standard Windows 2003 machine with striped SATA II hard drives. To keep things simple for performance testing, all machines are in the same room. I usually get an excellent connection.  I always enable encryption on the router, I’m not about to let my neighbors get access to my machines. I generally use the best encryption settings possible for the router/adapter pair I’m testing.  Nearly every product I test supports at least WPA-AES. 

I keep my house wireless router on channel 1,  so I have the most number of adjacent channels free to test on.  I set the router I’m testing to channel 6 or 11.

I sanity check the wireless routers by directly connecting test machines and server with the built in Ethernet ports and doing the same file copy testing.  With a 100Mbps Ethernet adapter in my test machine, I can consistently see ~90 Mbps.

I call file copies to the server “Transmit testing”, and copying files from the server “Receive testing”.  Sometimes I see big speed differences in receive and transmit testing and I’ll note this in my reviews when that happens. 

Surprisingly, I also see some adapters lockup or routers reset after doing as little as 200MB of file copies.  It’s easy to tell when your router is resetting if your in the same room because the Ethernet and Wireless connections will both drop for a minute. I don’t know how some products get shipped performing like that.

So I think that the way I’m testing is OK, I get good results, and more importantly my results are repeatable. 

I don’t do any special testing on wireless adapter drivers, yet.