In the author's earlier work, we demonstrated how performance degradation and PAPR concerns in OFDM can be overcome by application of carrier interferometry (CI) spreading codes. In this work, the authors employ RF test equipment and analyze the practical performance of OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) based IEEE 802.11a WLAN vs. their proposed carrier interferometry (CI) OFDM based WLAN. Specifically, RF test results (in a typical indoor office environment) are used to analyze the proposed CI/OFDM and CI/COFDM technologies. It is shown that in a typical office environment, at a bit error rate of 10/sup -3/, the CI technology gains 5-7 dB over current OFDM.