How to get 30 mbps

[smitbret]

My limited 11ac experience, 11ac is still pretty decent. It is very heavily dependent on a good client and a good base station and also drops with range pretty significantly, but same room, I've seen TP-Link Archer C7 and Intel 7260AC cards push in to the 400+Mbps range, which is the better part of half of the 867Mbps singaling rate of 2:2 11ac 80MHz. Move a couple of rooms over and it does drop fast, but its still over 200Mbps.

Just as a real world example of this.

I had a pair of TP-Link Archer C7s with one in bridge mode so that I could connect my upstairs and downstairs without a cable. They were through a floor and a wall and about 10-12 feet apart in a straight line about 45 degrees. When I first tested the LAN speed I was getting about 212Mbps. When I moved it 2 feet to the left so that it wasn't directly below the metal ducting from the furnace, speeds jumped to about 360Write/425Read.

5GHz is so picky......

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Thanks. I'm not surprised that is the answer, but I am a bit annoyed that a wireless adapter advertises "Up to 54Mbps Wireless Data Rates" if it can really only get a third of those rates.

Any recommendations on a new adapter and router? I'll be playing online MMORPGs and MOBAs and streaming Netflix. I am willing to pay for a quality connection, but don't want to purchase AC1900 if it doesn't have a noticeable benefit over AC1200, Wireless-N, etc...

You get those speeds perfectly fine if you use all the same conditions that the tests were done in. Specific SNR, specific signal strength etc. Also, dont forget to take protocol overhead, retransmits, encryption overhead etc. It IS 54mbps, just not all of it is actual payload data. Thank marketing for those kinds of misconceptions.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Just as a real world example of this.

I had a pair of TP-Link Archer C7s with one in bridge mode so that I could connect my upstairs and downstairs without a cable. They were through a floor and a wall and about 10-12 feet apart in a straight line about 45 degrees. When I first tested the LAN speed I was getting about 212Mbps. When I moved it 2 feet to the left so that it wasn't directly below the metal ducting from the furnace, speeds jumped to about 360Write/425Read.

5GHz is so picky......

5GHz is a shorter wavelength which means less penetration. You also were going vertical from the AP which is crappy from a coverage standpoint when using omni directional antenna. You were likely picking up reflected/refracted/diffracted signal which can affect performance. Also depending on numerous factors you could have either got better, or worse performance from multipathing where the same radio wave hits multiple times due to its reflection pattern. Newer wireless devices actually use multipath to their advantage but as with anything wireless your mileage may vary

TLDR; Wireless is a strange beast

 

[azazel1024]

Its a million times harder than wired in a lot of ways.

My sticky situation in my house is that I have a 4ft thick masonry chimney and fireplace between my playroom and garage and the rest of my house. The Playroom is also, currently, our main TV watching room. So if I want good signal in there, the AP has to be in there...but if I move in to the living room next door, because the signal effectively HAS to go through the fireplace, I go from around -28dBi or so 6ft away on the edge of my couch nearest the AP...to -55dBi. This is on 2.4GHz (I cringe at how 5GHz would handle it). So I have to run a second AP on the opposite side of my house if I want decent coverage.

The playroom AP can handle the garage, playroom, half bath and the living room and dinning room abuting the playroom. The basement router handles the basement, the 3 bedrooms and bathroom above where it is located on the opposite end of the house and generally the kitchen.

The garage AP (with antennas outside) handles the outside and that is it (the metal siding FRIES the signal. My playroom AP, 30ft away and through an exterior wall...but not a wall that has metal siding, provides a -55dBi signal. The AP in the garage with the antennas located 4ft away, but through the exterior wall (no insulation, no drywall, just 1/2" ply and metal siding with a foam core) provides -68dBi of signal there.

Wifi, even 2.4GHz, HATES metal. It doesn't really like masonry and its simply on uncomfortable terms with wood and drywall.

In my townhouse with duct work through the walls and floors, I'd notice a similar behavior. If I had a duct between me and my router, I could watch my RSSI drop easily 10-15dBi just by stepping a couple of feet to one side or the other.

 

[JackMDS]

Nice covers for 1Gb CAT6,

https://www.google.com/search?q=dec...DG8zKsQTFkoGABQ&ved=0CEgQ7Ak&biw=1366&bih=549

 

[Blastman]

I don't know what 11g ideal use case actual bandwidth is, but it seems to be slightly less than half of the stated rate. Roughly 22Mbps is the ideal, clean EMI environment usage.

11n is a bit better than this. I've seen around 60% realizable speeds. For example, my 300Mbps 802.11n connection I see up to about 170Mbps regularly, or almost 57%, and I have seen some spikes a little higher pushing 180Mbps.

Yup. When I looked at user tests on my Asus N13 N300 USB adapter, there was a youtube video review of it and the tester was able to get actual transfer speeds of ~ 60% of the connection speed on N150. I agree, wireless n is better (updated protocols and encoding) than g in this respect.

I'm in the basement connected to some Cisco N150 wireless router, 20ft away with 2 walls, floor + furnace in between me and the router which is on the main floor. I have 5 bars and my connection is usually 130 or 144, sometimes a little less depending on interference. This is 2.4Ghz/20Mhz. My internet is 25/3 (down/up) and I can always max that out easily using speedtest.net on n.

For fun, I tried lowering my adapter to g to see what speeds I could get. Connected at 48 but could only get around 12mbps download on speedtest. So even though I'm pretty close to the router, g isn't near fast enough to get me my full internet speeds.

Even just a single band n N150 wifi router would be good enough for your use, although, if you have a huge amount of other n routers around you might consider a dual band.

 

[azazel1024]

Yeah, I tried the same just the other night. I maxed at about 21Mbps down and 22Mbps up on 11g between my Netgear 3500Lv1 and my 7260AC in my laptop. I switched back to 11n and 300Mbps (max of the router) and speeds went back up to 172Mbps down and 188Mbps up.

Dual band is a good way to go to switch over to 5GHz, but also multistream n can help. It won't necessarily solve a congestion problem, but the air time it CAN eek out, it'll be able to cram more through the pipes.

Congestion is where things start getting nasty though, not just speed wise. Its when you start running in to things like streaming video breaking down and stuff.

Heck, I can stream 1080p over 11g just fine in my current house with zero competing networks. In my old townhouse with a plethora of competing networks, I had a hard time stream 720p over my 11n 300Mbps link (and switching to 20MHz didn't really help)...even though I could get 10-12MB/sec close to my router, streaming video still just broke down most of the time.

 

[smitbret]

Heck, I can stream 1080p over 11g just fine in my current house with zero competing networks. In my old townhouse with a plethora of competing networks, I had a hard time stream 720p over my 11n 300Mbps link (and switching to 20MHz didn't really help)...even though I could get 10-12MB/sec close to my router, streaming video still just broke down most of the time.

1080p, 720p and other resolution references mean nearly nothing for examples like this. You may be able to stream a low bitrate 1080p but not a high bitrate 720p.

 

[azazel1024]

Okay, to simplify I had no problems streaming a 12Mbps 1080p stream over 11g in my current house with zero competing networks. In my townhouse on 300Mbps 11n I couldn't stream a 7Mbps 720p without dropped frames.

This despite the fact that I could get 80-120Mbps at the same location in my TH...compared to around 21Mbps on 11g in my current house (or around 170-180Mbps on 2:2 40MHz 11n. Of course in my current house I can easily push 4 12Mbps 1080p streams flawlessly on 11n, and some other wifi useage in there).