24 Put the two together, as ShareWave does, and the synergies are extremely compelling. They deliver multimedia capability, high effective speeds, complete independence of location, and efficiently manage the addition of more nodes to the network. They do not sacrifice device performance when networked. In gauging realizable home network performance, it is important to know that raw bandwidth is not a true measure - two home networking technologies with the same raw bandwidth can deliver very different performance. High effective throughput, a quantitative measure, and the type of network protocol, a more qualitative measure dealing with how bandwidth is managed, determine realizable performance.
Effective throughput refers to the bandwidth actually available to carry data packets.
Other home networking protocols can have up to four times as much overhead as Whitecap, resulting in significantly lower effective throughput. TDMA, used by ShareWave's Whitecap protocols, partitions bandwidth to allow multimedia transmissions to take priority over less time sensitive transmissions such as print commands. CSMA, the access mechanism used by other home networking protocols, makes all transmissions fight for slots over one unpartitioned bandwidth, meaning multimedia content does not get priority over less time sensitive traffic such as print and file saving commands. As more traffic is added to the network, the probability of data packet collisions increases, causing unexpected latency in packet arrival a serious impediment to consistent quality of multimedia support. Network protocols can further affect performance through numerous other features or lack of features such as Quality of Service.