D-Link DHN-910 Phone Networking Kit

The Test

Performance

After testing Midpoint's modem sharing, it was time for the head-to-head: Phone network vs. conventional unshielded twisted pair. The phone network was tested using two PC's connected directly by one of the included phone patch cords. The UTP network (a basic Unshielded Twisted Pair network like the ones you will find in many offices) was set up on the same two PC's using a common PCI network adapter, based on the Realtek 8029 chipset and costing about the same amount as one of the D-Link cards. They were connected using a crossover cable in order to circumvent using a network hub, which would have introduced a dependence on the performance of the hub, thus possibly skewing the tests. The PC's we used for the tests were configured nearly the same. The first was a Celeron 300A, and the second was a Celeron 333. Both machines had 128MBs of PC100 SDRAM on an Asus P2B motherboard. Both also had a 13GB Western Digital UDMA as their Hard Drive.

The competition consisted of three separate tests, including file copying one file of 150 MB's, file copying 10 files with a total size of 55 MB's, and a throughput test using a freeware testing program called NetCPS, authored by Jarle Aase. The file copying portion of the tests illustrates a common real-world situation of copying data from one point on the network to another. The NetCPS test is a strict throughput test, moving 100MB's worth of packets across the network and measuring the time it takes. NetCPS doesn't read from or write to the hard drive, so it remains a uniform test in that it has very little dependency on the computer on which it is running. Each test result is the average of three passes of the test.
Here they are:

The point is, the phone network is virtually the same speed as the UTP network, delivering up to about 7.8 Mbps true throughput. The maximum throughput of both standards, HomePNA and 10MBps Ethernet over UTP cable, is 10MBps, but that is an ideal speed based on available bandwidth. In other words, you won't see a full 10Mbps throughput on any 10Mbps network. Anything above about 7.5-8.0 Mbps is considered as quite fast. The 7.8 Mbps achieved in the tests, therefore, should be regarded as a very good performance.