Wi-FI signal strength help

nlel1975 · 29 Apr 2020 at 17:08

The Asus PCE-88 is an AC 3100 PCI-E device costing £ 66.66 ex VAT and the Asus RT-AC86U Router is an AC 2900 device costing £ 150 ex VAT therefore £ 216.66 ex VAT in total for both.

My Netgear A7000 AC 1900 USB device was £ 54.32 ex VAT and my Netgear R6800 AC 1900 router was £ 66.66 ex VAT therefore £ 120.98 ex VAT for both. No point comparing my AC 1900 devices with AC 2900/3100 devices.

When I bought my A7000 AC 1900 USB device my internet connection speed was 236 Mbps so it was capable of that and only recently has my speed increased to 472 Mbps.

If I wanted better WIFI speeds it would cost me £ 216.66 ex VAT less whatever I sold my current devices for. I'm sticking with Ethernet though as that will be better than any WIFI equipment.

WJA96 · 29 Apr 2020 at 17:44

Well, with those settings I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's extremely unlikely you're hitting those speeds.

My understanding is that the maximum possible throughput on 5GHz on VHT80 is 1300Mbps under absolutely perfect conditions. And then it's half duplex so you can only ever actually transfer at half that speed (750Mbps) and then the real world crashes in and you can realistically get about 650Mbps under extremely good real world conditions. That's with nothing else at all in the channels that might cause the client to drop back to VHT40 or even VHT20.

I need to read up on iPerf but I think you've actually got 230Mbps x 4, which isn't the same as 800Mbps but I'm not sure.

If you add more iPerf threads does it go up more or does it plateau out?

WJA96 · 29 Apr 2020 at 17:47

nlel1975 said:
If I wanted better WIFI speeds it would cost me £ 216.66 ex VAT less whatever I sold my current devices for. I'm sticking with Ethernet though as that will be better than any WIFI equipment.

If @Gammawolf really is hitting transfer rates of over 886Mbps then it is effectively as fast as a 1Gbps ethernet wired connection.

In the Mikrotik Wireless Wire product I linked to, Mikrotik have used a 60GHz frequency to enable them to get the data in faster. Theoretically, they have 12x more bandwidth to play with on 60GHz than on 5GHz but they only get about double the real-world speed.

I know people are claiming that AX/WIFI6 can do 2Gbps but this isn't 6GHz AX, this is 5GHz AC.

nlel1975 · 29 Apr 2020 at 17:50

Ping time wouldn’t be as good with WiFi, my Ethernet cable is ready for the 10 Gbps future

WJA96 · 29 Apr 2020 at 17:56

nlel1975 said:
Ping time wouldn’t be as good with WiFi, my Ethernet cable is ready for the 10 Gbps future

What are you basing that statement on? Any ping/latency in your LAN is made much less important by ping/latency in the WAN.

I had a customer who complained that they had a shiny new Daisy leased line 1Gbps symmetric and they couldn't download faster than 300Mbps. So we contacted the company he was downloading from (Embarcadero) and they explained that they limited everyone to 300Mbps. It's not always about how fast your connection is or how much latency there is in your connection.

The single biggest improvement in perceived speed/responsiveness I've ever seen was where someone was running their own local DNS server.

nlel1975 · 29 Apr 2020 at 18:03

If I’m testing my download speed I always download the 10 Gio from this site as well as running speed tests...

http://proof.ovh.net/files/

That will max out my connection.

Disregard what I said about pings Wifi will only add 1 to 2ms to the server on the WAN.

WJA96 · 30 Apr 2020 at 07:22

nlel1975 said:
If I’m testing my download speed I always download the 10 Gio from this site as well as running speed tests...

http://proof.ovh.net/files/

That will max out my connection.

Disregard what I said about pings Wifi will only add 1 to 2ms to the server on the WAN.

This isn't so much about download speed, this is about transfer speed between two devices inside your LAN across the wireless connection. iPerf is a great tool for this and the link you supplied uses it. @Gammawolf has used 4 threads supposedly simultaneously to get his 886Mbps transfer speed which isn't a technique I've seen before hence my asking for more information as I don't think speeds faster than 750mbps are feasible with 802.11ac. But I'm very happy to be proved wrong.