Friday, March 4, 2011

March Post: USB Wireless

The obligatory March Post

Spinach is dead. Well his motherboard is dead his hard drives; one is failing one is still good.

I have two USB wireless devices and thought I'd compare the performance of each on the current Ubuntu release. I like sticking command lines in my posts.


mark@flounder:~$ cat /etc/issue.net
Ubuntu 10.10


I'll try to control myself by using screenshots this month. The two devices are a TP-Link TL-WN422G and a Netgear WG111v3. The TP-Link has an external antenna.

The first thing I did was unplug flounder's ethernet cable from the switch so that I know that I'm only using wireless to connect to the internet. I used Speed Test dot Net to test each device. I used Gnome's builtin screenshooter thingy to take the screenshots. Gimp worked well to edit out my IP address from the screenshots.

My procedure was to plug in each device and let the network manager connect to my router. Note here I've previously connected each and saved my network's password for each so the authentication step is skipped. I then ran two commands, ifconfig and lsusb, to show that I had only one configured network device and which USB device was in use. The network manager dropdown is called by a left click on the icon.

First the Netgear WG111v3.



Things to notice: download speed was 9.95 Mb/s, I was not able to connect to the open "linksys" network.

Now the TP-Link TP-WN422G.



Things to notice: download speed was 16.5 Mb/s, I was able to connect to the open "linksys" network. Download speed was 3.9 Mb/s using that network.

Anybody want to buy a slightly used Netgear W111v3? I think I'll keep the TP-Link. I've not had a chance to test either in a mobile environment.

seizure
-mark