Now that XOHM coverage has been confirmed in many areas - including the launch site of Baltimore as well as Philadelphia and Chicago - the world is waiting to find out whether its really as great as Sprint has advertised.
We ordered both the Zyxel Mac206M2 Home Modem and the Samsung SWC-E100 ExpressCard so that we could test them both and see if one performed better. On the official XOHM site, potential speeds are quoted at 2 - 4 Mbps download and 0.5 - 1.5 Mbps up. Let's see how the modems did in a real-life situation!
The tests were performed near Chicago, IL, in the same house for both tests.
Zyxel Mac206M2 Home Modem: We tested the Zyxel directly connected via ethernet to a Mac Powerbook running Leopard. We performed three tests, about 3 hours apart, to account for fluctuations.
Test 1:
Test 2:
Test 3:
After the speed tests, we checked how long it took to ping Google:
Here is the tracerout test to Google - 108.33 ms:
These initial tests are very promising! The average download speed was about 4.5Mbps - faster than XOHM's promises. The upload speed, which averaged at about 1.2, came in well within the rage quoted. Based on the times we ran these, it definitely looks like your speeds can fluctuate based on the time of day - there are a lot fewer people accessing the network at 3:42am.
For the ExpressCard, we switched to a Toshiba laptop running Windows Vista Home (remember: the ExpressCard does NOT work with Macs). Here are the results:
While impressive, the results with the ExpressCard paled in comparison to what we saw with the Zyxel. The download speed was 30% lower and there was an even bigger gap with upload, which came in 33% lower than with the home modem. However, the speeds on the ExpressCard still fell within their promised speeds.
The difference between the results are most likely due to the internal antennas within the Zyxel Home Modem, making it able to access a strong signal further from the tower than the ExpressCard. It is possible that the ExpressCard could perform more strongly had we been right beneath a tower. Alternatively, an antenna might help - when they become available!
Whether or not XOHM's performance lives up to the hype remains to be seen. So few people are using it at this point that it's difficult to gage how it will be effected when it becomes more widespread. For the time being, though, we are happy to see that it IS possible to get those high speeds - especially with the home modem!
