My Office Space July 2013 (Addendum): Benchmarks & Troubleshoot

Posted in Cloud Computing, Communication, Computer Hardware, Troubleshoot

My Office Space July 2013 Addendum

After upgrading my Internet from 60Mbps to 150Mbps downstream earlier this month, I simply was expecting a massive performance increase when streaming video from my iPad (for example). But … it did not / no increase; still bad. Which is why I created this separate blogpost with the troubleshoot … to get to the bottom of this nuisance and document the solution. And while at it? Share other benchmarks results.

LAN (D630 laptop) SpeedTest.net Results

To be able to compare how fast things should be (WiFi) wise, first the benchmark results of the local area network (with CAT5 UTP cables):

LAN speeds: before the Broadband upgrade

LAN speeds: After the Broadband upgrade

Not reaching the advertised 150Mbit. But double the speed; Nice increase!

WiFi (iPad) SpeedTest.net App Results

Now let’s see how WiFi performs …

Internet Speeds PROOF BEFORE the Troubleshoot

For some odd reason my TP-Link Access Point only allows me to get 2Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up when I’m in bed.

So?! Get out of bed then!

… but we are lazy :-p

… strange huh? And these benchmarks are performed 3-5 meters away from this external omnidirectional 5dBi antenna:

Internet Speeds PROOF AFTER the Troubleshoot

Bam! Now we are talking! And the 17.8Mbit result is a “stress test” measured 3 rooms away.

Troubleshoot; What and How I did IT

I started yesterday by upgrading the Ultraman 12.09rc1 firmware to 12.09 final release. No change. Messing around with WMM, QoS, channels, 20/40MHz, etc. No substantial changes either. Hmm; odd, to say the least!

So was about to give up … when I uploaded an old stock firmware. W/o encryption I got 38.42Mbps! That’s pretty much the practical max. of the iPad!

Geekbench (D630 laptop) Benchmarks

OSX Mavericks Developer Preview 1

Disabled speedstep in BIOS. No tweaking yet whatsoever …

OSX Mavericks Developer Preview 2

oops … ‘forgot’ to make them

OSX Mavericks Developer Preview 3

Still no speed tweaks, cause I’m just happy with everything so far. Oh this test wasn’t performed ‘clean’ (Dropbox, Chrome and Google Docs were running). A constant results;