Analysis of power consumption in consumer ADSL modems

This report describes an experiment carried out to understand how traffic transfer affects power consumption on consumer-grade ADSL modems. Three ADSL modems were studied: a Linksys AG041, a Cisco 837 and a Netgear DG834G. Parallel streams of data were sent between a client and a server PC and the effect on power consumption by the routers was recorded. We discovered that there was almost no difference in the amount of power drawn from the routers with regards to the amount of data transferred or the duration of transfer. We did determine that the Linksys AG041 draws significantly more power than the other two routers.