Netgear WN2500RP Wireless Extender with FastLane Technology Still Cuts Speed in Half?

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kevdliu

Honorable
Feb 9, 2014
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0
10,510
Hello,

I've recently purchased the Netgear WN2500RP wireless extender in hopes of improving the wifi coverage and speed on the second floor of my house. The wireless extender is equipped with what Netgear calls FastLane technology where the router and the extender communicate via the 5GHz band while the extender the client devices communicate via the 2.4GHz band. It sounds all so great but during my testing I found that speed is still cut in half. I have performed the following 3 tests:

1) Direct client to router via 5GHz:
Down: 98.54Mbps
Up: 13Mbps

2) Direct client to router via 2.4GHz:
Down: 35Mbps
Up: 12Mbps

3) Client to extender via 2.4GHz and extender to router via 5GHz (FastLane):
Down: 16Mbps
Up: 12Mbps

All 3 devices are in the same room as each other and have direct line of sight. According to the Netgear Wifi analytics app I'm the only 5GHz in the surrounding area.

Is there any way to improve the wifi performance further or is this the best I'm going to get?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
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It should at least in theory work as they advertise. This is a common way a repeater has been build before they sold all the stupid $29.99 things.

I still do this with 2 separate units one being outdoor and it does not slow it down much. You of course will get some slowdown since it must receive the data into buffers and then resend it. The ones I have used use different encryption keys and even that did not slow it down enough to really be detectible.

Its hard to say what they are really doing.... they make it seem like some magic thing. I know people do the exact same thing with asus routers running dd-wrt and it does not seem to suffer the penalty but it is hard to say with wireless the numbers tend to fluctuate a lot.

The...
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Drseevee

Reputable
Feb 2, 2015
11
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4,520
WIth Wireless only one device can transmit at a time in order for things to work, an example, pc connected to the extender, the pc transmits to the extender, the extender receives but cant transmit while it is still receiving from the pc (only one device at a time on a one frequncy 2.4GHz or 5GHz), then it can transmit to the next which has to wait... etc... Although I'm not too sure how it would affect your extender if it had a 2.4GHz and 5GHz transmitter since it could transmit or receive on both simultaneously, but nevertheless something to keep in mind when using wireless extenders, wireless is half duplex.

Basically because you can only have one device at a time you are halving the speed with each extender, its a little less than half due to packet loss etc. More Extenders probably wont help too much in terms of speed. Your alternatives would be to set up another wireless access point )different Channel, an old wireless router would do and connect it via ethernet cable, or you could look into powerline adapters these use your home electrical wiring you can also get models that provide not only an ethernet cable but also act as a wireless access point.

Sorry the explanation isn't the best but think the access point can't transmit whilst receiving that means there is time 'wasted' waiting for its turn to transmit, each step adds more time wasted and hence less data per second.
Hope this helps.
 
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bill001g

Titan
Aug 9, 2012
28,319
2,754
125,640
It should at least in theory work as they advertise. This is a common way a repeater has been build before they sold all the stupid $29.99 things.

I still do this with 2 separate units one being outdoor and it does not slow it down much. You of course will get some slowdown since it must receive the data into buffers and then resend it. The ones I have used use different encryption keys and even that did not slow it down enough to really be detectible.

Its hard to say what they are really doing.... they make it seem like some magic thing. I know people do the exact same thing with asus routers running dd-wrt and it does not seem to suffer the penalty but it is hard to say with wireless the numbers tend to fluctuate a lot.

The main reason you see the number of 1/2 the speed for many repeaters is they are transmitting into the same radio frequency which causes interference and since the end device can not actually hear the other far device you get into all kinds of extra overhead because the collision avoidance methods no longer work. The design of using a different radio for the backhaul should solve this issue.

Be nice if you could really see what is being send and received but even the wireless capture software is limited by the chipsets that only let you see good data and not damaged and discarded data.

 
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