I can't get 300Mbps on my router. Who's to blame?

paulo_andre

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Mar 18, 2011
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I just bough a TP-Link Archer C2 router. It is supposed to handle up to 433Mbps on 5GHz band.
I have a laptop with a centrino N 6230 network card and a Surface 2 Pro. Both are supposed to handle up to 300Mbps on the 5GHz band.
The problem is that I can only connect at 150Mbps on 5GHz.
Using SSIDer, I can see a 2.4GHZ network, with 2 channels at 300Mbps (but there's too much interference, I can very rarely connect at that) and I can see a 5GHz network, using 2 channels but only at 150Mbps, and I can't connect any higher. I already saw my laptop connected at 300Mbps on a 2.4GHz network and I'm almost sure also on a 5GHz network.
There are no other networks on 5GHz, I don't have any other wireless device on that band and I am really close to the router. Shouldn't I get the full 300Mbps? Do you think there is a problem with the router?
I tried disabling the 2.4Ghz radio on the router and changing some options, but there's not much to configure.
 

paulo_andre

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Mar 18, 2011
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I may answer my own thread...
I searched on wikipedia and the max speed for 1 stream on 802.11n (40MHz channels) is exacty 150Mbps. For 802.11ac it goes up to 433Mbps on 80MHz channels.
However, my network cards only support 802.11n and a max of 40MHz channels, so they only support 150Mbps if using one stream and 300Mbps using 2.
So now I believe the router handles 2 streams on 2.4GHz and only 1 on 5GHz. This means the max for 802.11n is exactly 300Mbps on 2.4 and 150Mps on 5. If my cards were 802.11ac then they would use the full 433Mpbs on 5GHz even with one stream.

TP-Link is to blame, they don't say the max speed for 802.11n is 300+150...
 
It is MUCH worse than you even think. The connection speeds have nothing to do with the actual data you get. Wireless is half duplex those quoted speeds are UP and DOWN load speeds combined. On top of that you only get a fraction of the rated speeds in a real world environment.

This is the sample of tested download rates on 2.4g even when they claim 450m you are lucky to get 100m

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/bar/111-2_4-ghz-dn-c
 

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