Performance

Transfer Rates

Plain and simple, the only reason you'll choose the 10Mbps card over the 1Mbps cards is for the faster transfer rate. We tried moving a couple files across the network to check out the AnyPoint system's real world transfer rates.

Our first 5,205KB file transfer took 9 seconds. That's about 4.5Mbps. We then tried moving a 31,694KB file. The move took about 44 seconds for a 5.6Mbps real world transfer rate. A 23,560KB file transfer took 35 seconds for a 5.3Mbps transfer rate. As you can see, our transfer rates were substantially lower than 10Mbps.

Internet Sharing

The Intel AnyPoint system comes with Intel's Internet Sharing Software (ISS), a proxy based internet sharing software. ISS allows users to share a single internet connection across the network. You have the option to install ISS in the initial software installation. You have to distinguish between the server computer (the one with the internet connection) and client computers (PCs on the network that will use the server's internet connection) during the ISS installation. We found that ISS worked right out of the box without any configuration. As soon as we installed the software, the client computer was able to browse the web through the server computer's DSL connection.

We complained about ISS in our original AnyPoint review because, in general, proxy server software isn't as efficient as NAT-based internet sharing software. The only reason to use a proxy server would be for administrative "snooping" features that monitor client usage, but ISS doesn't include any administrative features.

Sharing performance

We tried comparing transfer rates between the server and client computer by downloading the exact same Quake 3 1.17 patch file from each system. Transfer rates were pretty much the same, but this wasn't surprising because the internal network transfer rate is much higher than the DSL transfer rate.

We loaded up Quake 3 on the client machine and joined an online game. Pings were in the low twenties, which was surprising because we expected the proxy server to add more latency. As expected, the client and server machines were unable to join the same server.