First thing I tested was the range with my iPhone 3g, which can connect a using "G" speeds. I get a full signal throughout the house, and walking outside I still had a full signal, so I kept walking, with a continuous ping running to the router. I got to the end of the first neighbors house and pings started to occasionally time out, but could still easily browse the web. I did not loose signal until I got to the mailbox of the neighbor two houses down - about 300 feet! The next test was using my MacBook pro which supports wireless "N", which made it to the end of the 2nd house down before it dropped - a good 350ft, at least - and this is an area that is saturated with interference from other access points. While the range is great, this means I'm forcing my signal to neighbors two houses down in either direction, across the street and behind us too, so I plan to turn the power down to the low or medium settings... but I am tempted to get some large antennas in the attic and see what this thing can really do!
Next up was speed... First I tested moving a 714mb .iso file from my Xubuntu home server hardwired with fast ethernet , because it only has a 100mb NIC (more on that later) to my MacBook on N wireless, the transfer happened in one minute, 44 seconds, so thats 104 seconds, so thats 6.8 MB/S. Thats no where near the claimed spec of N wireless or Fast Etherent, but this is the real world here. The best that could be done over my old Netgear WRG614 was 4 MB/S... 4 MB/S!!!! The same test when conducted over wired ethernet happened in 23 seconds, or 31.0 Mb/s
and the speedtest, over wireless. I promise you, the performance of your router is a factor here. With the old Netgear, I maxed out at 12-15.
General web surfing is great, fast, snappy. Multicast is working between wired/wireless so I can still use my Avahi/bonjour based pseudo DNS running on the server. Don't worry - sometime soon I will fix that with BIND 9. Port forwarding is also works easily.
