How we did it
 
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We tested the access points and cards in a single floor office building (with steel wall studs and a sheet metal roof) and a nine-story office building. In the single story building, we set three test points: 3 feet, 60 feet through two walls, and 72 feet through four walls from the access points, which were mounted at the top of a free-standing rack.
We configured two identical Compaq Presario 700 notebooks, each running Windows XP Professional, to be clients. During our initial test phases, we immediately found problems getting good results. It appears that the client IP stack on XP Professional has problems - especially with the SMC drivers. We reconfigured one of the Presario 700 notebooks to run SuSE Linux 7.3 and serve an FTP server and were able to achieve consistent results.
The test procedure used the XP Professional Client's FTP application to get a 36M-byte file. The data rate performances recorded were the data rates specified by the XP command line interface-based FTP application on an average of 10 iterations after we threw out the two worst scores (which seem to come from aligning cache through the delivery chain). Note that a baseline wireline measurement through the Presario 700's built-in Realtek 100Base-TX network card yielded a rate of 78.4M bit/sec.
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Henderson and Ritchey are researchers at ExtremeLabs. They can be reached at thenderson@extremelabs.com and tritchey@extremelabs.com.
Henderson is also a member of the Network World Global Test Alliance, a cooperative of the premier reviewers in the network industry, each bringing to bear years of practical experience on every review. For more Test Alliance information, including what it takes to become a member, go to www.nwfusion.com/alliance.
