Does anyone really care about throughput?
The question has come up – does anyone really care about wireless LAN performance benchmarks? Given the high degree of variability in both configurability and the contribution of the environment to results, do benchmarks really tell us anything?
I’d answer a great big “yes” to that one.
While a buying decision will be based on many factors (hence the ratings system we use in this story), the performance we see in benchmarks can be a significant predictor of how well a given product will work in a production application. Products with good performance tend to have more robust radios and overall system implementations, and will likely work better under a variety of operating conditions. Given that production radio environments will become more complex, due primarily to interference; a robust radio should be a key selling point. That’s why stress testing, using longer range and turntables, for example, tells us a lot about how good a radio will perform in the often mission-critical real world.
