One of the things we love about PT7 is its data graphs. Now that we’ve seen the raw comparative results on the previous two pages, we want to look a little deeper into the data to show throughput over time. That said, we don’t want to get exhaustive and boring, so we’re going to cherry pick our results in order to illustrate points rather than be overly redundant.
AirLive, 2.4 GHz, TCP, Location 1
AirLive, 2.4 GHz, TCP, Location 3
To begin, let’s look at the effect of distance on our AirLive router under 2.4 GHz TCP traffic. Ideally, you want to see a straight line, signaling that throughput isn’t getting hammered by interference and traffic is moving smoothly. With more distance and obstacles, the propensity to see drop-outs in the chart increases. Thanks to its beamforming, the AirLive does a very respectable job and shows minimal erratic behavior in the second chart.
AirLive, 5.0 GHz, TCP, Location 3
AirLive, 5.0 GHz, TCP, Location 3
When we switch to 5.0 GHz for the same TCP tests, we see a much different and less expected story. Our same-room test with the AirLive looks blissfully even, although we see throughput take a sudden jump about 45 seconds into testing. This might signal something like a piece of interfering equipment suddenly turning off. While we ran our tests in fairly static conditions, we still saw such plateau hopping repeatedly in our test results across vendors.
Throughput hopping aside, look at our distance test results. What looks like a fair 57.6 Mb/s on our bar chart looks more like a manic disaster here. Throughput ranges from almost 80 Mb/s down to 0 Mb/s during one precipitous drop. While a cursory glance at averages could lead one to think this router can support HD streaming at distance, you have to watch where the graph bottoms out. This is the real qualifier. If, for example, a stream needs 10 or 20 Mb/s before system overhead, than this router clearly cannot deliver reliably under these conditions.
Asus 11ac, 5.0 GHz, TCP, Location 1
Asus 11n, 5.0 GHz, TCP, Location 1
Lest anyone think we’re only picking on AirLive, let’s examine a TCP quartet from Asus. Looking at 11ac same-room performance, we get a little jiggle in the opening second or so as the connection stabilizes, then a long, stable plateau at 90+ Mb/s, then a sudden jump into the 140+ Mb/s range. Then when we switch to 802.11n, all semblance of stability vanishes. Performance swings across a 100% range from 70 to 140 Mb/s. This is obviously workable from an application standpoint, but it shows the striking variability of 11n throughput, even for such an excellent-performing router.
Asus 11ac, 5.0 GHz, TCP, Location 3
Asus 11n, 5.0 GHz, TCP, Location 3
Going back to 11ac in our distance setting, we once more see a fleeting ramp-up in the connection, then an impressively narrow throughput band around 145 Mb/s. Seeing this performance level across the house still makes us giddy. Our 802.11n distance test shows another throughput leap in mid-test, but we again see a much broader performance band within the main plateau. Note, however, that we’re not seeing those drastic pits with Asus. Once it locks onto a throughput level, it’s very good about maintaining a floor.
Belkin 11ac, 5.0 GHz, TCP, Location 1
Bufflo 11ac, 5.0 GHz, TCP, Location 1
Linksys 11ac, 5.0 GHz, TCP, Location 1
Netgear 11ac, 5.0 GHz, TCP, Location 1
Finally, let’s look at our remaining four routers under best-case TCP conditions. Even without looking at the y-axis numbers, Belkin is obviously out. Buffalo has the most stable, perfect-looking chart of the bunch, though Netgear gives Buffalo an interesting challenge. While it has that little warm-up blip, Netgear’s sustained throughput is slightly better than Buffalo’s. Linksys looks much more erratic, but watch those y-axis values. Numbers over 300 Mb/s for TCP? Dang!
Why we sometimes see those performance plateau shifts remains a mystery. Since we’re only seeing upward shifts in our data, in future testing we may want to look at patterns over longer periods of time, say a half-hour or more. Maybe these stable plateaus aren’t so stable with a longer time scale. These shifts happen in both test locations, so it’s not a local effect, nor does there seem to be a correlation with router/bridge combinations. It could have something to do with the TCP/IP stack, but digging into this will require additional research. For now, it remains a question mark to revisit another day.
- 802.11ac: The Beginning
- 802.11ac Advances
- Broadcom: Insider Comments
- Broadcom: Insider Comments, Continued
- Broadcom: Insider Comments, Continued
- Test Setup And Methodology
- AirLive N450R And Asus RT-AC66U
- Belkin AC1200 DB And Buffalo AC1300/N900
- Linksys EA6500/AC1750 And Netgear R6300
- Results: 2 GB Folder Copy
- Results: PerformanceTest 7, Same-Room
- Results: PerformanceTest 7, Across-House
- Results: PerformanceTest 7 Graphs
- Results: IxChariot, Same-Room, 5.0 GHz
- Results: IxChariot
- Results: IxChariot, Across-House, 2.4 GHz
- 802.11ac: A Substantial Step Up From 802.11n
I think this review proved that it is time to wait for 2nd generation wireless AC routers to appear before rushing to purchase.
Never again...
I'll give ac a year or two before I jump on it...
I have a dual-band router (Netgear N600). I also purchased a couple of dual-band client USB adapters Linksys AE2500 or something to that effect.
So the USB adapter works fine for a desktop, but having that crap sticking out the side of a laptop, netbook or tablet? Busted in 10 minutes. I hooked one up to my netbook and fried it within a couple of weeks because I'm a Netbook in bed guy. You wouldn't think it could get so hot from a USB port but it does.
So the reality is that you have all these devices that can't be upgraded to dual-band and enjoy very little if any benefit from the new-fangled dual-band router.
The other beef I have with routers is that they're terrible with the way they split up bandwidth between multiple devices. Instead of responsively reassigning bandwidth to the device that needs it, the router continues to reserve a major slice for a device that I'm not using.
If you live in an apartment building, it's actually rather rude to use the full 300Mbps capacity of the wireless N band, since you may well succeed in effectively shutting your neighbor down. There's so much happening in the 2.4GHz band nowadays, it's unreal. Your own cordless keyboards/mice/controllers etc can malfunction from being unable to get a packet in edgewise.
For these dual-band routers to be really useful, we need manufacturers of smartphones, tablets, laptops, netbook and such to build dual-band clients into them because adding the functionality with some sort of dongle just doesn't work.
I think this review proved that it is time to wait for 2nd generation wireless AC routers to appear before rushing to purchase.
Never again...
I'll give ac a year or two before I jump on it...
Exactly. The 'client' adapter they used if anyone didn't catch it was a Cisco/Linksys router-sized device. Not practical by any means. It'd be totally insane to make any product recommendations prior to real client adapters being available, or more accurately, embedded ones are available. I think a wireless salesman wrote this article.
They can't put lipstick on this pig.
No actually , If you transfer from hardrive to hardrive you probably get a max output of 45MB/s The asus is close to 35MB/s wich is almost maxing out ur drives power. Ofcourse if you have a good performance you can get upto 80MB/s or a little more Not counting SSD to SSD transfer rates- Also remember that you will be able to transfer 4k HD content with the same amount of data that 1080p took
Shibby save us with another awesome tomato release!
Probably so. However, on the graph it's written Mb(Megabits), not MB(Megabytes). Since tehnically 8b=1B, 35Mb/s=4.38MB/s and that's very slow. That's why I asked if the graph meant Mb/s or MB/s.
Most networks - in my experience - are some sort of hodgepodge of different devices. So ac speeds are only really relevant if the results also translate over to the other spaces.
1) Wired performance: All of these things sport wired gigabit connectivity, but as with wireless we all know that wired performance can have wired bottlenecks and problems of its own. I am sure they are all better than wireless or 100/t... but what kind of throughput are we talking about? Personally (and I know I am not alone on this), I like wireless for portable devices, but for something that never moves like a TV or a PC it is really not that much extra effort to run a line under carpet or through a vent.
-Specifically I am curious to know if any of these routers can run their ethernet in a gang mode so that I can have 2 gigabit lines to a server, and 2 lines to my PC (and 1 line to my wife's PC) so I can have enough throughput to offload all of my HDDs to a central location and have a truly silent PC without having to use a seperate switch or router. I do video editing, and obviously cannot afford 10GbE in the home, so this type of setup is needed to get the 150+MB/s throughput needed for real video editing (until consumer 5GbE or 10GbE becomes available... where is that tech anyways?). I am currently using a wireless G router, and then an old (and noisy) gigabit switch (using 5 ports on a 24 port switch lol), and to be able to consolidate both devices would be really nice.
2) High traffic performance: We all know that G and N suffer once you populate a network with a lot of devices, or have multiple networks congesting the same area. While I personally have very low traffic in my area (very low-tech neighbors), I know a ton of readers live in apartments, or have businesses with a ton of machines, and it would be nice for them to know how many devices you can have before having to worry about a serious performance fall-off. As most devices are still on N it would also be curious to see if these new routers can support more devices on N before seeing fall-off than traditional N devices.
3) Internet performance: I have 'decently fast' internet at my home, but that is still only ~25Mb/s. But when wireless G is at 54Mb/s it makes it rather hard to justify getting anything faster than G for your average home user that is simply using wireless on 1-3 devices for internet access, and there is very little file sharing going on. Are there any real-world tests to show some significant performance boost for such simple 'internet only' uses? Perhaps lower ping rates, or more consistent performance at that 25Mb/s level?
4) Power savings: I think more than anything that 11ac is going to show most of it's usefulness in power savings for future portable devices (and I think that ties in a lot with why they are marketing it as 5G to tie in with the cell network speak of 3G and 4G). I look at my friends phones that are only 1-2 years old, and they have to disable the wifi to get a full day's battery out of the phone because wifi's idle simply takes too much power. Compare that to new phones (or even higher quality old phones) which you can leave the wifi on all day and not have a significant battery issue. Even my 5 year old laptop gains an hour or more of battery life (a near 1/3 life boost) simply by turning off the wifi switch, so obviously the new radios in devices are getting much better at battery life without sacrificing much in the way of performance. Also cell providers like ATT and VZW have a lot of incentive to push 5G on phones and in houses to off-load cell traffic.
Anywho, I guess what I am curious about is if the actual network speed is what gains the battery performance, or if it is merely having a more modern radio which brings such gains. As mentioned already, I am running 11g both at work and at home, and so 'all things being equal' the battery impact of wireless appears to have more to do with how modern the device is rather than the speed of the wireless network. I understand the 'race to sleep' argument, but if your internet coming in is only ~5-30Mb/s then I relay wonder if the end device will be able to sleep much at all. Because no matter if your network is 54Mb/s or 1300Mb/s the slow drip of the internet connection is going to keep those radios awake the entire time the internet is up. So is the 5G battery improvement really going to be from the network speed? Or is it merely going to be a factor of having a smaller and more efficient radio package to begin with regardless of what network it hooks up to?
-Note: this is not the same thing as comparing 3G to 4G/LTE networks where the actual internet speed is faster allowing the device to gets it's job done faster and go to sleep faster. When on a network the internet speed is a relative constant (and almost always slower than 11g), and I am curious if changing the wireless from 11g to 11n/ac provides any battery gain on any given device for a set workload.
Anywho, Great article! My old wireless G router is starting to have troubles, and needs to be reset every 4-6 weeks, so I am really curious about getting either a high end 11n device, or a midrange 11ac device before the year is out. And if I can find one that can last the 8+ years that my current linksys G router did then all the better! We don't see a lot of wireless articles here on Toms, and it is something that is increasingly important as people put heavier workloads and take bigger machines off of wired connections.