qcheckity check yourself

Today while surveying some hotels, I used Xixia’s qcheck to give me a “real” throughput number to jive with the instantaneous modulation/RSSI levels that my Intel program and inssider tool were giving me. Qcheck is quick, dirty, and effective, although not as feature rich or extensible as other tools, such as iperf. (direct d/l link HERE)

Outside each hotel room, I would easily get ~12 Mbps, yet as soon as I came in the room (right by the window), my speed might drop to 9 Mbps, and on the first bed, I might get only around 6 Mbps on the first bed. The second bed might get 4 or 5 Mbps, and the sink area would drop to less than 1 Mbps. Bathrooms were the worst — around 300 Kbps or so. Interestingly, I almost never lost a continuous ping the whole time.

Today we easily light up the faces of several hotels with just one cheapo BA100 unit with the default internal antenna with a 9 degree tilt. Our second hotel today was a textbook case. One unit on each side of the 9 x 14 room area gave us solid coverage, and a unit on top with LOS to each unit provided the egress and backhaul to the downstairs units. As an added bonus, we found a perfect little water resistant cranny for the unit to permanently live on top of the roof!