Belkin 802.11g Wireless DSL/Cable Gateway Router - Testing

There are not a whole lot of tests you can run to compare wireless routers, but I wanted to figure out how long it took to transfer a massive file, and see how close to the theoretical maximum transfer rate this router can get. The computer was almost 15 feet away from the router, in direct sight with nothing the signal had to pass through except the air. I took the movie "Titanic" and ripped a 1:1 copy, totaling 6,334 MB in size. This file was transferred by dragging and dropping the file to a shared folder on the other computer. I started with the wired transfer; both computers are connected to the router by network cable. For the wireless connection, I made the computer send the file through the wireless router.

The wireless video transfer took around 55 minutes, while it took a mere 15 minutes to transfer through wired connection. 802.11g is the fastest certified speed, and this is still very far behind its wired counterpart. It is not very encouraging if you want to transfer large files to various computers on a regular basis. There was no "turbo" mode, or any other setting which would allow any faster speeds. A few companies offer 108 Mbps, which is double the speed of the regular 802.11g, but this router is only straight 54Mbps.

I also streamed video both ways from PC to PC to see if I could over saturate the router's bandwidth. I used two of the WMV HD movies available from Microsoft: "Step into Liquid" and "Magic of Flight." Both of these movies were 1080i HD format. I had one computer wired to the router, and the other connected wirelessly, around 15 feet from the router. I was very surprised that the router could keep up with the demand the movies. In the first five seconds I did lose some frames on the wired computer, but next it was smooth sailing.