iPhone wifi timetrials -- netcat over wifi

I've been doing some housecleaning in my dev-notes and came upon something worthy of a quick paste.
A while back I had noted the performance of the iPhone wifi sitting directly on top of the powerbook-17 1.2ghz running Leopard which was acting as the dedicated AP. I did my best to aim the iPhone at the antenna of the Powerbook on several trial runs to move the speed up or down by a margin of 10-20% by swiveling, rotating, propping, and relocating the iPhone.

Both of the nodes had each other's /etc/hosts sync'd up with the localnetwork default address. There was no default route, nothing but .75 duplex 2.6 ghz and .12 inches between them. (+ a USB cable for sleep prevention)
Netcat is as IO-bound as any program gets, so I am pretty sure this represents the iPhone and powerbook's 802.11g default configuration throughputs.
Scientifically speaking, this is one console-capture, but I ran a dozen partial and full trial runs tests with nearly identical K/s numbers and that was good enough for me.

currently, my iPhone is bone-stock 1.1.3 by accident, awaiting the iPhone SDK. This benchmark took place in December '07.

Setup:

On the iPhone:: socket-connect

# time  nc < /dev/disk0  -vvv   169.254.19.49 9999 

Foehammer.local 

[169.254.19.49] 9999 (distinct) 

open  sent 220610560, rcvd 0  

nc -vvv 169.254.19.49 9999 < /dev/disk0   

0.64s user 56.12s system 35% cpu  2:41.41 total    

On the Powerbook::

jim@Foehammer ~/ipod $ time nc -vvv  -w30 -l  -p 9999  >iphone.disk0.dmg
listening on [any] 9999 ...
connect to [169.254.19.49]
from iPhone-001CB36763B2.local [169.254.222.51] 49519
sent 0, rcvd 220546904

real    2m43.590s
user    0m0.638s
sys    0m9.693s

Google's math of the outcome

((220546904 bytes) / (((120 seconds)) + (43.59000 seconds))) / Mbps = 10.2857103 Mbps

The take-home

The end-goal was determining if Xbox XBMC could hook up to iPhone ftp/samba/upnp shares and play videos without preloading the Xbox hard drive. the answer is most MP4 which fall under 4Mbit, but due to CPU requirements, only "iPod" (768Kb/s) h.264 would be feasable (due to the Xbox's meager 733 MegaHamsterZ).

Higher media throughputs might work if the Xbox sits on the wifi AP connected by cat3 wire or better, and the compression is nil, but in reality mine sits usb-powering its portable d-link DWL-G730AP, and it bogs mightily under the dlink bargain wifi hardware curse.

post-script

The follow-on project to this experiment was to facilitate a python or ruby torrent client intermittently droning along on EDGE bandwidth, staging various file acquisition activities. That particular notion was not a success.
xvid-avis, wmv, etc under 4Mbits would likely work rock steady as well, but chances are they would only be there in the first place in the bittorrent completed files zone, since porting mplayer, vlc, or ffplay was not on any of my iPhone todo's (not prior to a Gentoo install).