Software To Test Wireless Lan Speed ?

[vivek]

Hello

I bought a NetGear wireless router and PC card. The software installation for the PC card installed a netgear software that I can use to check the wireless connection status between the router and the pc card.

I was wondering if you could recommend any other software that I could use to check this connection speed between the router and pc card.
I am interested in a software for Windows.

Thank you
Regards
Vivek

 

[JackMDS]

The MHz value of communication that is provided by someWireless Card Utilities means very little. It is a very general representation (which includes the signal and accumulation of transmission noises) it is not capable to actually measure the signal. To measure the signal you need special standard Hardware.

Here you have choices of such devices: http://www.spybase.com/csurveillance.html

From Software point of view it does not matter what you use. Wireless is just an Air replacement to Cable. The Network ?Speed? of transferring is a result of what the hardware can do and depends on the OS and software that you are using. E.g. FTP usually would transfer faster than Win Explorer.

The following is considered as one of the standards:

A FREE Utility for Network Troubleshooting from NetIQ!).

You install the master program on one computer, and End point Client on all other computers on the Network.

 

[mboy]

Net Iq's Qcheck should do it for you if you can find it.

EDIT*** Jack beat me to it.

 

[vivek]

Hello.

Thanks for the info. I will try out the softwares that you pointed.

Regards
Vivek

 

[vivek]

Hello

I tried the software at http://www.netiq.com/qcheck/default.asp.

I installed one instance on the laptop and the other on my desktop.

The NetGear software was showing the connection speed between the laptop's NetGear PC card and the NetGear wireless router to be around 72 Mbps (it can go upto 108 Mbps, 802.11g extended). But the NetIQ software showed the throughput to be around 30 Mbps for datapacket size of 1000 Kbytes.

How is there so much of difference ? (around 40-50Mbps)

The desktop is connected to the wireless router using a 100Mbps ethernet connection.

Did I test wrong ?

Thanks
Regards
Vivek

 

[JackMDS]

NetIQ gives a Reading that is very close to Raw, windows has a lot of overhead.

BTW, very nice 72Mb/sec. is really impressive.

I do not know what the Netgear Utility measures (if it measures anything).

However in real life neither is so important.

Transfer a 10MB file, see how long it takes and compute the ?Speed?.

E.g. Using Windows Explorer with a good 100Mb/sec Wired Network10MB file should be transferred in about 1.2 sec.

 

[vivek]

Hello

Thanks for helping me out.

It took around 58 secs to transfer a 35MBytes file from the laptop to the desktop (copy initiated from the desktop). That is approximately 4.7Mbps !! Hmm..wonder what does NetGear software shows as 76 Mbps (or 96Mbps or 108Mbps).

Any idea ?

Thank you
Regards
Vivek