Wind energy is one of the main contributors to renewable generation. In order to embed wind farms in Smart Grid concepts, wind turbine controllers have the objective to follow an accumulated total power generation reference while at the same time the controllers aim to reduce the damage (wear out), which the individual wind turbine has to sustain. This paper looks at a centralized control architecture for control of wind turbines, in which sensors at the wind turbine periodically provide their values via a local sensor network and an IP-based wide area network, based on which the controller calculates new set-points. Subsequently, the set-points are sent back to the wind turbine via the IP-based network. Testbed measurements of delays and message loss of di erent network technologies 2G, 3G, PLC and WLAN are captured while mimicking the control scenario of the wind farm. These measurement traces are fed back into a co-simulation framework to then show the impact on control performance of the di erent technologies. The results show that 2G and narrow-band PLC cannot support the presented control scenario, mainly due to throughput and delay limitations, while 3G and WLAN technologies are able to provide the necessary communication bandwidth and low delays. The measured delay distributions of the latter two technologies can be used to optimize the scheduling of sensor readings and the bene t from such optimizations is qualitatively discussed.