[lug] WirelessN

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Fri, 2010-05-21 at 09:49 -0600, Stephen Queen wrote:

> Am just curious what kind of speed you are getting with your 802.11g
> and how fast is your internet connection? 

The 802.11g throughput to that particular media computer is the
bottleneck because we can get HD content to wired computers around the
house that play without skipping.  Also, the CPU and GPU are not the
problem because that media computer has a 9800GT GPU and an AMD
Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 2700MHz CPU, both
sufficiently powerful to handle HD content.

> I would think (I can only get the slowest DSL offered so have given up
> looking, it only causes me discontentment) that the internet
> connection would be where the bottle neck existed.  

No, I checked that.  We have sufficient throughput on our Comcast
internet connection to handle the media content.  Both my wife (Mac) and
I (Fedora) can play HD content on wired nodes in the house without skips
or pauses.

> When I run iperf and there is no other network traffic I get appox.
> >9Mbps. Is this not fast enough for streaming video?

In our house there is *always* other traffic.  In fact, my wife and I
sit in our lounge chairs in front of the TV with our laptops in our lap
and do work or browse while we watch TV.  It's quite the sad sight,
actually.  But our dogs seem to like it.

I don't get anywhere near that due to congestion in the neighborhood in
the 2.4GHz range.  That's why I'm trying to go to the WirelessN router
since they offer the 5GHz range.  To my knowledge, the G routers don't
offer 5GHz.

I used http://www.bandwidthplace.com/ to test throughput from the
Internet and not just internally.  On the wired nodes I got sufficient
speeds to meet Hulu's specs for HD content.  On the wireless node I
don't come close.  Content displayed in SD works fine on the wireless
node.  But HD content skips and pauses quite a bit.  As best as I can
tell this is strictly a problem with congestion in the 2.4GHz range.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Principal Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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I respect only those who both plan and accomplish.  Success is both direction 
  and achievement.  Everything else is an accident.  --  Michael J. Hammel