Gigabit Wireless? Five 802.11ac Routers, Benchmarked

By William Van Winkle
published

Five years ago, we didn't have homes with a dozen wireless nodes and the need to run HD video to multiple screens. Today we do. Our 802.11n networks, especially on the 2.4 GHz band, are swamped. Can 802.11ac save the day? We test six routers to find out.

Results: PerformanceTest 7, Across-House

Now onto the long distance TCP trials for PT7. Once again, Belkin can’t connect, which is only slightly worse than its performance in our same-room setting. Even with beamforming, AirLive takes a hefty hit on throughput, although it still holds up admirably in the 55+ Mb/s range. Asus, Buffalo, and Netgear nearly triple that number, with Asus again emerging the victor. The gap for Linksys is noticeable. Having been fans of the company’s recent consumer routers, we’re starting to wonder if Linksys might have shipped its firmware a little earlier than engineers might have liked. Hopefully, a subsequent update will help.

Not much news here with UDP. Netgear now jumps into first place, suggesting that perhaps there's 5% worth of wiggle room in our tests. If so, then all five functioning routers are statistically in a dead heat for this test.

Moving to 2.4 GHz TCP at distance, we should restate that what we see in Belkin here used to be the norm for 2.4 GHz routers at this location. All five remaining routers deserve praise for holding a connection at all in this difficult arrangement. Linksys finally shows some moxie, coming in second to Asus, the only product to break 100 Mb/s on this chart.

The UDP results are all over 600 Mb/s. Move along, nothing to see here.

William Van Winkle
70 Comments Comment from the forums
  • The Scion of Balance
    Do the graphs really meant Mb/s? If so, isn't it still very slow?
    Reply
  • boulbox
    Well, i can't wait until i can make my router give wifi all the way to my to my work area.(only a few blocks away)
    Reply
  • I've tested both the R6300 and the RT-AC66U in my home. The R6300 beats it hands down. The average homes won't have the traffic that your artificial software creates. Even your tests show that R6300 in 5ghz mode is faster. People will buy these for gaming and HD movie viewing and the R6300 has better range as well. I've paired my R6300 with an ASUS PCE-AC66 desktop wireless AC adapter and I can acheive 30 MB/S (megabytes) to my HTPC in a 2 story house. That's an insane speed. The RT-AC66U only managed about 15 to 18 MB/s. Also make sure the R6300 has the latest firmware, which is V1.0.2.38_1.0.33. But in conclusion, the R6300 and the RT-AC66U are like a SRT Viper and ZR1 Vette. They are both great pieces of hardware to fit most users needs. Get the ASUS If you got a ton of traffic and a lot of 2.4 ghz devices. Grab the R6300 if you are looking for a friendly setup, max speed, and max range.
    Reply
  • fwupow
    Man it sure sucks when you type a long comment and it gets vaporized cuz you weren't logged in.
    Reply
  • DeusAres
    I'd be happy with a 2Mb/s connection. It'd be better than this horrible 512 Kb/s connection I have now. At least then, I may actually be able to watch youtube vids in 360p.
    Reply
  • fwupow
    Here's the gist of what I typed before it was rudely vaporized.

    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.
    Reply
  • memadmax
    I was a 802.11g and n "adoption" tester....

    Never again...

    I'll give ac a year or two before I jump on it...
    Reply
  • SteelCity1981
    my wireless N produces 300 Megabits which would equal around 37 Megabytes. My highspeed internet doesn't come cloe to reaching 37 megabytes and i don't transfer tons of files wirelesly and my wi-fi rangs is pretty good .So i'm perfectly fine with my 300MB N wireless router right now. Besides that none of my devices spport ac anyhow so it would get bottlenecked from reaching its full potential.
    Reply
  • Kaldor
    What were they using for a wireless network adapter on the client side?
    Reply
  • chuckchurch
    iknowhowtofixit"Folks, the time to start your 802.11ac adoption is now."I think this review proved that it is time to wait for 2nd generation wireless AC routers to appear before rushing to purchase.
    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.
    Reply