Real-World 802.11ac Wi-Fi Testing: 7×6 Routers-x-Adapters Matrix. Part III. Results and Conclusions

Now, we’re coming to the juiciest part of our three-part mini-series on real-world Wi-Fi testing – to RESULTS (for test setup, please refer to the first part on the routers-we-used and the second part on the adapters).

Cold Hard Data

5GHz Results

All results are in MBit/sec; ‘Dn’ means ‘from router to adapter’, and ‘Up’ means ‘adapter to router’; as it was mentioned before – all the results are for a single TCP connection.

The same results can be seen in the following picture:

2.4GHz Results

Similar data for 2.4 GHz look as follows:

And graphical representation of the same thing can be seen on the following graph:

Conclusions

Now, let’s try to make some generalizations and conclusions based on the data above. As usual, everything goes with a Big Fat Disclaimer(tm) that all the conclusions are based on a limited data set, and that the picture can change in the future, and that YMMV, etc. etc. Still, IMO the following can be said with more-or-less confidence:

• “There is no such thing as 'the best router'; strictly speaking - you need to test each specific pair of (router,adapter) to get anywhere-reliable results.There is no such thing as “the best router”; strictly speaking – you need to test each specific pair of (router,adapter) to get anywhere-reliable results.
• Our results for some of the adapters are better than those which were observed in [Winkle2013]; whether it indicates a difference in testing setups, or an overall improvement in Wi-Fi routers/adapters over these 4 years – is unclear, but being an optimist, I certainly hope for the latter <smile />.
  • It seems that we’ve got to the point when we can occasionally get to 50% (and sometimes even to 70%) of the theoretical bandwidth, which isn’t bad.
• As long as we’re speaking about the trivial Wi-Fi network with laptops connected directly to routers – all 2×2 802.11ac/802.11n routers and above, are about the same. In particular, there is no obvious correlation between router price and measured speeds. Sure, it is a logical consequence of us using only 1×1 and 2×2 adapters, but as these adapters tend to dominate the laptop market by far, this choice of adapters is just a reflection of real-world realities. On the other hand, as soon as we get our clavicles on 3×3 laptop adapter – we’ll add it to the mix (but won’t add too many of them to avoid skewing the picture).
• As for the adapters – they DO matter, and A LOT. Here, we can (still very tentatively at this point) observe the following properties:
  • built-in laptop adapters tend to outperform comparable USB adapters. In other words – think twice before buying 2×2 USB adapter to replace your 2×2 built-in adapter.
  • When speaking about the chipsets and manufacturers – there is a so-far-rather-clear hierarchy:
    • The best ones are those by Intel (AC****); however, AFAIK, Intel doesn’t produce USB-enabled Wi-Fi chips, so building a USB adapter on top of Intel chips is going to be expensive (and AFAIK, they don’t exist now).
    • Mediatek is IMO a “reasonable price/performance choice”. Also, it is “the best thing we can realistically get for USB” (in particular, NET-DYN is pretty good; the only its observed weak point was with AC-5300 on 2.4GHz, and even then @25MBit/s it wasn’t “atrocious”).
    • As for the Realtek – with that limited data we have now (and given those two Realtek adapters we’ve seen – Alfa and Kootek), I’d rather stay away from Realtek-based adapters. In 2017, connection speeds of 50kByte/s (yes, that’s KILO-bytes in the local network!) are not just “slow”, they’re “atrociously slow”.
    • NB: up to now, we didn’t test any Broadcom- or Qualcomm-based adapters (yet); my wild guess is that these should be good (at least on par with Intel) – but let’s see until we add some Broadcom- and/or Qualcomm-based adapters to the matrix.

Future Work

In the future, we hope to extend our matrix, so we have a better picture. In particular, over time we hope to add 1×1 router or two to the mix, and to extend our list of adapters (in particular, adding Killer and probably some 3×3 adapters are on our TODO-list, as well as, probably one more Realtek adapter to see whether the suggestion above stands).

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Acknowledgement

Cartoons by Sergey Gordeev from Gordeev Animation Graphics, Prague.