Testing Wireless Network N speeds

[Sean Dempsey]

I finally got an N router, so now all my Mac's and iphone can connect on the N band. My network utility says it's connected at 144 Mbit/s, but that's what it always says.

Is there an application I can install on 2 devices and see what sort of throughput I get over the N network in my house? And also over the Gigabit ports (I have wired connections as well)?

Seems like there should be a network speed test utility somewhere, but I've yet to find one.

 

[Hellhammer]

This article might help you. Basically, just pick a file and use e.g. iStat to monitor the network speeds and transfer the file between two machines.

 

[Sean Dempsey]

3.6 MB/S

What does that translate to with the network utility saying I'm on the N at 144 Mbit/S?

 

[Sean Dempsey]

Does that mean it's transfering over Wirless N at roughly 28.8 Mbit/s?

So on a 144mbit link, I'm getting 28mbits?

That seems bad.

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

Do you have the iPhone 4? All other iPhones can't connect to 802.11n, which would drop your whole network back to 802.11g unless you have a dual-band router.

 

[Sean Dempsey]

New problem.

This ****** E2000 router gets me 20mbit off my new ISP connection. All my devices are on N, and say they're linked at 144mbit.

So, I do a speedtest.net test, and get 20mbit, great right? Since 20mbit is way below the theoretic speed of N, I presume that my N is connected well since the Network Utility says 144mbit.

I move upstairs, and my wireless adapter still says it's connected at 133mbits, well above the 20mbit my ISP provides for internet. But when I run a speedtest from upstairs, I get 10mbit.

How is that possible? I can understand that my WLAN speed might drop, but how does a wire N connection test at 20mbit, and then move upstairs and its maxing out at 10mbit... which means I'm barely connecting at what a Wireless G adapter would connect?

Mind you, I'm not running LAN speed tests, I'm running Internet speed tests, and I don't see how a 20 meg pipe could be cut to 10 meg by the distance to my router when I'm using all wireless N adapters.

Time to get a Airport Extreme or what?

 

[FluJunkie]

First thing I would try is to run speedtest multiple times in both the first and second locations, and look at the distribution of times.

I've found my speed, sitting at the same computer connected to the same pipe, to be fairly variable based on that particular site.