XAVB501 Network Performance Supporting tagline

I just recently purchased the Netgear XAVB501 ethernet over power adapter
to improve network performance in my town home. Owing to the way this house
was built, it’s really difficult to pull new wiring throughout the house, and
even so, I am not sure it’s worth the trouble. So I decided to give this
device a shot.

Owing to my interests in high-performance computing, I decided to do a bit
of casual testing using the iperf tool. I will stress that my
results are a bit non-scientific, because I have not done an large number
of runs yet.

Here is a look at the kind of wireless performance I was getting between two endpoints.
To ensure maximum bandwidth, one of the endpoints (my laptop) is connected by
Wireless-N, while the other endpoint is connected directly to a wired port
(the Netgear XAVB501 in particular).

lucky13:~ gkt$ iperf -c hub.local
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to hub.local, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:   129 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.10.1.101 port 64776 connected with 10.10.1.110 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  32.2 MBytes  27.0 Mbits/sec

This is a wired-to-wired test, where I switched the laptop to connect directly
to a wired port. Keep in mind that my use of the XAVB501 is not aimed at
eliminating the use of wireless at home. The idea is to get an idea of the
peak bandwidth possible over two of these gizmos.

------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to hub.local, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:   129 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 4] local 10.10.1.110 port 5001 connected with 10.10.1.117 port 64939
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[ 4]   0.0-10.0 sec  68.2 MBytes  57.2 Mbits/sec

Without any kind of attempt to optimize my backbone, I’m seeing more than
2x bandwidth in my testing. In fact, when I do larger transfers, the speed is
about 3x the Wireless-N performance.

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