Gigabit Wireless? Five 802.11ac Routers, Benchmarked

Test Setup And Methodology

We must begin with the usual caveats about wireless testing. As we detailed in Part 2 of Why Your Wi-Fi Sucks, environmental conditions wreak havoc on residential throughput tests, such as those we’ve conducted here. However, unless one has access to an industrial-class, sealed RF test chamber or perhaps the isolation of lunar orbit, there’s nothing to do but try to pick an environment with fairly limited competing RF traffic and interference. That is, if that’s what you want. There’s a convincing counter-argument that can be made for picking a highly congested environment, as this will reflect difficult real world conditions and pose greater challenges to routers. Real world is good. Randomly fluctuating conditions are bad. Still, by looking for patterns across a diversity of tests and traffic types, we believe we can draw some fairly reliable general conclusions.

We conducted all testing in my home, a 2,650 square-foot, two-story house in a suburban area outside of Portland, Oregon. We conducted all 2.4 GHz tests using 40 MHz/auto settings on channel 1, as this channel (out of the selections 1, 6, and 11) tended to have the lowest number of visible competing access points. Similarly, we used channel 161 for all 5.0 GHz tests. Like so many other variables in Wi-Fi testing, there was some debate over this point as well. We ultimately decided on fixed channels for the sake of consistency across the routers being tested. We might have alternately selected the more popular 2.4 GHz channel 11, as higher frequencies tend to offer higher throughput, even at the risk of encountering more obstruction from surrounding traffic. Moreover, we might have left channel selection unlocked to better see how routers coped with changing environmental conditions. There is no right or wrong approach here, and we might return to test these variables in a future follow-up article.

We tested with two systems, a “server” desktop system and a “client” notebook. The server remained positioned in the home’s upper floor corner office. The client rested in either the same office at a direct line of sight distance of 10 feet from the server or it was positioned about 70 feet away, in the home’s opposite downstairs corner. In all tests, the server connected to the router via gigabit Ethernet. The client connected to a spare Netgear R6300 router in bridge mode for 2.4 GHz testing, and a Cisco Linksys WUMC710 bridge for 802.11ac work (via gigabit Ethernet). The directional orientation of the routers and bridges was kept consistent for all tests.

We conducted three basic tests. First, we created a 2.00 GB folder containing hundreds of MP3, EXE, and stray work document files. This was used to test transfer throughput speeds in both directions. Next, we turned to the networking test module in PassMark’s PerformanceTest 7 suite (we'll transition to version 8 in subsequent articles.) As a corroboration of PerformanceTest 7, as well as a deeper look at some of our traffic’s attributes, we ended with Ixia’s IxChariot. Specifically, we ran two of IxChariot’s built-in scripts. We transferred 100 records with the High-Performance TCP Throughput script and 1000 records with the UDP Throughput script.

Here are our two system configurations: