advancedmixedgaming :
Hi, yesterday I bought a netgear AC600 wireless adapter for my desktop pc and so far I have been very disappointed. It says I should be able to get up to a 433Mbps download speed, but I've been maxing out at 75kbps. I am running the wifi through my hotspot on my phone at 5ghz, but the download speeds fluctuate at a max of 75kbps. Any ideas on why it's acting like this?
There are at least two issues here. One is Netgear advertising the Phy rate of the adapter as though it were the actual throughput. The other is the bottleneck created by your phone's hotspot.
First, look at mcsindex.com. 433.3 Mbps is the Phy rate for 256-QAM 5/6 at 80 MHz width on 1 spatial stream. The Phy rate is what the adapter's wifi radio can do
before applying wifi's anti-collision features. Because of the TDMA transit window spacing out each frame transmission, a 433 Mbps Phy rate could range in throughput from 75 Mbps to 292 Mbps before taking into account attenuation or interference, which would lower the throughput even more.
All manufacturers lie to consumers in this way. Just apply the 40% rule to whatever they say is the "up to speed" for a given frequency band, and that would get you the average throughput at zero distance from the router.
Second, your phone is probably a bottleneck. If you're using its hotspot feature to transmit internet packets via wifi, then you're at the mercy of your cellular provider's network and whatever bandwidth they can deliver to you. If that happens to be 75
kbps, then that's the bottleneck. Your adapter won't exceed the bandwidth at the bottleneck.
In any case, even if you were using a very capable wifi router instead of your phone's hotspot feature, you shouldn't expect more than 75 Mbps-292 Mbps in total throughput with a lousy adapter like the AC600. I loathe those things for having fussy drivers that (at least in the past) wouldn't install on Ubuntu, but the bigger problem is that they use a very, very early 802.11ac chipset without MIMO.