Is wireless network card upgrade for desktop to 5G needed?

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Tseg

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I recently bought a Netgear AC1900 router with 2.4G/5G. A lot of my portable stuff connects to the 5G band but my son's pimped out desktop upstairs has only an 'N' vs. 'AC' card so only connects to the 2.4G band.

First let me say the AC1900 has really been impressive for me. Second, my son's computer has great connectivity to the 2.4G wireless. But, if the card gets upgraded will he have even faster connections (there is reference to 'up to 1300Mbps' with 5G and only '600Mbps' with 2.4G)? I've found little about how noticeable a difference that is in usability. Is such an upgrade worth jumping through hoops (my son has not asked for it) - the card upgrade is ~$30 but I'm more not looking forward to the potential pain of the hardware and driver exchange that ultimately could cause me more grief than it is worth.

All I've found on the internet is 2.4G is more susceptible to slowness if there are a lot of users, but now that I've moved other hardware to 5G... and knowing we have not really seen an issue as-is... not sure any benefit will be realized? What are your thoughts?

Getting his desktop hard-wired 2 stories above is not going to happen.
 
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If you go to some of the testing sites they claim the netgear can get about 90m max on the 2.4g and 200m on the 5g.

Still it is impossible to even predict the speeds in your house. If you were to test in a open room with the router in the same room and assuming no neighbors on any radio channels interfering the 5g would likely be faster than the 2.4g because of 802.11ac

Problem is once you start talking about walls inbetween 5g tends to not perform as well. You never really know some houses the 5g has no issues and other it can be blocked by a single wall.

What has been happening lately though is because 2.4g is so over crowded the inability of the signal to easily pass though a wall can be a advantage because exterior wall...
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bill001g

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Can the machine get the rated speed on your internet connection. If it can already get the maximum speed then there is no way to improve other than buying more bandwidth from the ISP.

Don't even think that those numbers mean anything they are magic marketing numbers mostly. Even the very fastest 802.11ac routers paired with the best 802.11ac nic cards only get a few hundred mbit/sec download rates.
 
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Tseg

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Thanks for the suggestions. What I know is my download speed on my wired computer is 10% quicker than with 2.4G wifi based on the Ookla speed test. Upload speed is about identical. So the question is... is 10% a big deal? How much of that 10% would be reduced by a 5G ac card? Based on this, what now? Keep in mind my son's computer is 2 floors up... probably 40+ft. away from the router through a couple floors and a wall... and he's getting 4 of 5 bars. Formerly I was using a Cisco/Linksys E4200 where he was getting 2-3 bars with 2.4G wifi.

Wired computer:



2.4G wifi:

 
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bill001g

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If you go to some of the testing sites they claim the netgear can get about 90m max on the 2.4g and 200m on the 5g.

Still it is impossible to even predict the speeds in your house. If you were to test in a open room with the router in the same room and assuming no neighbors on any radio channels interfering the 5g would likely be faster than the 2.4g because of 802.11ac

Problem is once you start talking about walls inbetween 5g tends to not perform as well. You never really know some houses the 5g has no issues and other it can be blocked by a single wall.

What has been happening lately though is because 2.4g is so over crowded the inability of the signal to easily pass though a wall can be a advantage because exterior wall block the 5g signal much better than the interior ones so it also does a better job of blocking the neighbors signals.

Unfortunately all the numbers and speeds can only give you a general guidance. The house and the radio environment makes all the difference and there really is no way to predict what will work and what will not. This is why you see such variations in the reviews from wireless products.

If I were you I would say 53.57m is more than good enough. You really can't use more than that for most things. Even the newest hd video at 4k resolutions only run about 16m/sec.
 
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OriginalCadaver

OriginalCadaver

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If you really want to test how well the 5G will work, then take a device to your son's room and connect to the 5G and see what kind of signal you're getting. Honestly, I wouldn't worry about upgrading since the 2.4 card is working perfectly fine.
 
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Tseg

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Last question... at 50+Mbps where I know streaming video has no issue... does this 10% variance between the benchmark in my house (wired 59Mbps) and 2.4G (wifi 53Mbps) present any discernable lag for online video game play?

I guess I'm trying to discern what benefits from a 10% improvement? I'm guessing that would benefit downloading of massive files - which rarely would occur? I backup files to a home server through this router... but since upload speeds between wifi and wired are identical it sounds like no benefit to be had there?

In summary, if 53Mbps vs. 59Mbps has zero affect with online gameplay and streaming videos and it only benefits massive file downloads... likely I stick with just 2.4G. Any other computer activities affected via networking speed?

On my work computer (I work from home) which is wired directly I am constantly swapping files through sharesites... so could see potential value in a 10% wifi boost, but probably not of any value for my son who has limited homework sharesite activity.
 
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bill001g

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games do not care about bandwidth too much. Most are well under 1mbit since they don't want to eliminate customers who can only get slow dsl.

They key thing they do care about is consistent delays in the packets. For example one that give 100ms all the time will actually perform better than one that jumps around between say 20ms and 70ms even though the latency is lower. Of course any packet loss is the most common cause of lag in games. Wireless does both of these function badly since it is subject to random interference. Hard to say if the frequencies of the radio makes much difference.

The only way you can really use these big internet connections is to run bit torrent. Single file downloads are limited by latency in the network and concept of tcp window size. There are only a handful of truly valid torrent ...and of course the worst offenders are just download copies of linux and warcraft over and over again.
 
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