[Soekris] Net4256 Wireless performance

[Stephen Patrick]

Hi

I wonder if people can share their experiences for wireless throughput.

I have a couple of Net4256s, 133MHz, with an atheros Dual-band a/b/g card in
each
Boards are happily running Mikrotik RouterOS.

Running RouterOS on one of the 4256's in Access Point mode, 
I can connect from my 2GHz Fujitsu laptop, Windows XP, with a Netgear WAG511
dual-band a/b/g card.
Putting the laptop very close (1 foot away), the netgear wireless
application s/w shows '54Mbps' connection as expected in 5.8GHz mode.
Both 4256 and laptop are set to 128-bit WEP security.  
The 4256 are connected to the office LAN, which has 10/100 switched Ethernet
which doesn't cause bottle-necks on other bandwidth tests we do.  In any
case, the in-build bandwidth tester runs between the laptop and the AP, not
actually traffic through the LAN, so the LAN is't the problem.

I only get 6Mbps throughput, peak, one-way traffic.
The AP appears to be running flat-out whether this is file transfer, or
using the Mikrotik Bandwidth tester.
The RouterOS application shows CPU usage of 100% when doing this, and very
little (<20%) when idle.
It seems the CPU clock speed is the limiting factor here.

Any other experiences to suggest whether I should be getting higher
throughput on a 133MHz system?

My end goal is to use 2 boards in bridge mode, for now I was am using AP
mode to test the boards individually.
Anyone else using Soekris board as wireless bridges, with high bandwidth
requirements, I would appreciate any comments.

I have not tried Linux-based s/w on them yet - and would like to know which
of RouterOS and Linux would offer best bandwidth performance for given CPU
speeds.

Many thanks

Stephen
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.soekris.com/pipermail/soekris-tech/attachments/20040715/889970a4/attachment.html