I asked my linkedin extended network to help me figure out why I was getting such lousy WLAN performance. This was my question:

Why is WLAN still so slow? How come wireless-N products don’t test significantly faster than plain old 802.11G?

I’ve been doing lots of performance testing of WLAN products and writing up the results on my blog (www.bohannontech.com). I was excited at first because I bought some nice new 802.11N 270Mbps products from all of the major brands, Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, and Trend. These products often show a connection speed of 270Mbps, but the actual speeds of file copies is terrible – some as slow as 6 Mbps, and this is with 2 computers in the same room. When I run the same tests with wired Ethernet, I will consistently get 80Mbps.

Has anyone been able to get a real performing wireless-N setup and if so, can you recommend any products? Read the rest of this entry »