Home PNA "Phoneline Networking" Round Up

The HomePNA standard dictates that the performance of these cards shouldn't change no matter how they are hooked up (properly, of course) or even if the phone line they are on is in use. To make sure that is the case we did three sets of three passes with good old NetCPS. In case you haven't heard us talk about it yet, NetCPS is a great little utility that can pass any amount of data across the network without dependence on the rest of the hardware in the computer (it doesn't use the hard drives to store the data it passes).

The three separate tests involved are 1) Direct Connection, where the two network cards are connected by way of a phone extension cable (male rj-11 on each end) 2) Phone line, where the cards are each connected to a jack on the same phone line, and 3) Off-Hook, which is the same as 2, but with the phone line in use. The NetCPS results are below:

Test Machines

Windows 98 SE Test System
Hardware
CPU(s) Celeron 333
Motherboard ASUS P2B
Memory 128MB PC100 SDRAM
Hard Drive Western Digital 13GB UDMA/33

Software
Operating System Windows 98 SE

Results

Average Time taken and Throughput in Mb/sec to copy 100 MB data