Review of the Intel® AnyPoint™ Home Network
Last updated: 07/29/03

PERFORMANCE.  AnyPoint is not a fast network.  In processes which are slow in comparison to the 1 Mhz network speed, such as printing and shared Internet communications, the lack of network speed is hardly noticeable.  I found that the speed of printing to network printers in a two PC network under unloaded and loaded conditions was practically identical to a 10 Mhz Ethernet with the same computers.  The perception of the speed of Internet connections shared by two computers, on an unloaded network, was nearly the same as that obtained using the ICS features of Windows 98 Second Edition on a 10 Mhz Ethernet.  However, with the network loaded by a file transfer between a Client and the Server, I noticed a definite and annoying jerkiness in mouse movement on the AnyPoint ICS Server.

For occasional file transfers and copying small files Anypoint works fine.  But for frequent transfers, loading large applications from one PC to another, and for lengthy file transfers, such as PC to PC backups, it leaves much to be desired.  I flatly disagree with Intel's argument that the speed of this 1 Mhz network should be compared to the speed a user may see at work on a '10 Mhz network shared by 50 PCs' because most business networks are becoming 100 Mhz networks, most 10 Mhz networks I have seen and built aren't shared by 50 PCs, and, primarily, because the argument itself is illogical.  If you are going compare the price/performance of this network with an alternative network, requiring the installation of network cards and cabling, then you should be comparing oranges with oranges; i.e., two networks with the same number of PCs.  I have done that.  On a two PC network, AnyPoint transferred 94 files, consisting of 105 Mbytes, in 29 minutes, 34 seconds.   A 10 Mhz 10BaseT Ethernet with the same two computers transferred the same files in 3 minutes, 3 seconds, or, as one might expect, about ten times faster. (You may think that a 100 Mhz network would be about 100 times faster, but most 100 Mhz PC peer-to-peer networks are limited by the speed the PCs and, overall, are about 12-15% faster than a 10 Mhz network for the computers I tested.)  But, on the other hand, the numbers aren't as bad as they may appear if one uses a home network to share the Internet and printers and occasionally transfers small files.  28 seconds to transfer a one MByte file on an AnyPoint network is quite tolerable for a home network and much faster than the time to download the same file over a high-speed Internet connection (here, I'm comparing apples and oranges)

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