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Gigabit wifi
Mugsley
DelawareRegistered User regular
DelawareRegistered User regular
We set up FIOS Gigabit recently, but the only device in the house able to truly take advantage of it is my desktop that's connected to the gateway. We have a TPLink Archer C50 that is working fine as our wireless AP, but it maxes out at 100Mb; so I'm looking for options.
Most devices in our house are wireless. My desktop, a wireless AP for our thermostat (it came with the furnace), and my SteamLink are pretty much everything that connects via ethernet. The TPLink radios have better range in our house than the brand new FiOS AP; despite the TPLink being roughly 18 months old. House is ~2500 sq ft; two floors. The TPLink AP can cover the entire house, both floors, without a signal booster, when it's set up next to my desktop on one far wall of the first floor of the house.
I'm considering the Ubiquiti AP since I can get one for ~$70 but I'm reading confusing information regarding whether I need to get a CloudKey for the AP if I decide not to set up a guest network. Another option would be a version of the Netgear Nighthawk/Blackhawk but those tend to get expensive very fast. Are there other brands I should consider?
Edit for clarification: I'm not expecting full gigabit over wifi. I'm just looking for hardware that will give me greater than 100Mb throughput.
Most devices in our house are wireless. My desktop, a wireless AP for our thermostat (it came with the furnace), and my SteamLink are pretty much everything that connects via ethernet. The TPLink radios have better range in our house than the brand new FiOS AP; despite the TPLink being roughly 18 months old. House is ~2500 sq ft; two floors. The TPLink AP can cover the entire house, both floors, without a signal booster, when it's set up next to my desktop on one far wall of the first floor of the house.
I'm considering the Ubiquiti AP since I can get one for ~$70 but I'm reading confusing information regarding whether I need to get a CloudKey for the AP if I decide not to set up a guest network. Another option would be a version of the Netgear Nighthawk/Blackhawk but those tend to get expensive very fast. Are there other brands I should consider?
Edit for clarification: I'm not expecting full gigabit over wifi. I'm just looking for hardware that will give me greater than 100Mb throughput.
Mugsley on
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That means the access points and the end clients have to support it.
It's capable of about 300 but that's in perfect situations, so expect to get maybe 200 at the best with channel bonding. Also if you have things like wireless house phones or microwaves nearby they will reduce that speed while in use (they interfere with channel bonding because of the EM noise they put out).
100mbit/sec is more than enough for most uses though, what are you trying to do wirelessly that you need more than that? Streaming 4k video only requires about 25-30 mbit/sec.
Justify paying for gigabit? That's about it.
Maybe it's a bad assumption on my part, but based on my pedestrian tests, I felt I was limited by the capacity of the wifi hardware I currently have installed. If that's actually not the case, then I can save some dollars (and discuss moving down to 100Mb in the near future)
I'm still confused. I shut my computer off or put it on Sleep nightly. Does it *only* need a CK to initially configure and to keep a guest network running, or will the AP shit itself if as soon as a controller isn't on the network?
I think you can probably get more out of your system with bonding if the devices on the other end support it (newer laptops and game systems). But 100 mbit is pretty average and more than enough for most people. Hell 54MBit of Wireless G is usually more than enough (stream 4k while doing other stuff on a laptop).
But yeah this is why wireless is a crapshoot, you may not be able to guarantee better and it becomes a problem of "how much should you spend on this?" And if you live in a populated area you're going to be fighting with neighbors for use of some of the wireless frequencies.
A better solution is using Ethernet over Powerline devices and wiring everything up instead of using wireless. Usually you can get much better speeds and latency, assuming your house isn't older than dirt.
This helps to keep me from searching in futility for a solution that doesn't necessarily exist. Thanks!
If you do look into replacing your router, get one that does 802.11ac with MIMO (essentially channel bonding).
Actually getting sustained gigabit download speeds from the internet is surprisingly hard.
gigabit also translates to 125 Megabytes per second, which will actually be faster than the max I/O capacity of lower end devices (i.e. phones) so even if you do find something that will give you gigabit transfer rates, the device won't actually be able to receive the data fast enough.
gigabit wireless is useful if you do a lot of file transfers on the LAN, but honestly, right now, it's super hard to saturate gigabit from the internet.
The more I read casually, though, 100Mbit is more the current limit based on hosting/server/service bandwidth.
AC routers are now generally marketed as AC1200, AC1900, AC3200, and AC5300. the numbers there represent the maximum speed the router can sustain with the bonded channels. So as an example, AC3200 generally has 2 ac channels at 1300mbps and an n channel with a theoretical max of 600mbps.
AC5300 is a special snowflake because it uses a proprietary broadcom wireless chipset that isn't actually standard 802.11. the receiving device also has to have the same broadcom chipset to be able to receive at the max theoretical speeds. It's normal 802.11ac wifi speed should be identical to AC3200 units.
honestly, I have a google wifi unit, which is "only" AC1200, and I've run network tests and have been able to get about 600mbit sustained on wifi, and my PC's wifi card can "only" do 867mbps so it's actually hitting a pretty high percentage of the max theoretical speed it can achieve. That's been more than good enough for me.
If you want/need to have the best in home wifi on consumer gear, get an AC3200 unit, an AC1900 will also be fine, and hell even AC1200 is good enough in the vast majority of cases.
don't overthink it.
This is pretty much my standard answer for wifi. If what you have works, don't fuck with it. But if it starts giving you issues, replace it because wifi is dumb.
Test the existing equipment with LAN speed tests to make sure that your speeds are good. (i.e. move the largest single file you can find from one device to another) over wifi, and see what the speeds are.
that specific router supports 1x 5GHz band at 867mbps, which is the lowest spec for 802.11ac, but it still means that on ac you should still see a max speed of 600mbps-ish depending on range/coverage, etc. over longer distances that might drop off to 300ish, and of course at the extreme range the speeds will be garbage because the connection will be garbage.
802.11ac is amazing for gaming and I'd daresay the first time they got it right as far as consistency for gaming goes. However, home-grade range extenders are still really fuckawful and you're better off just repositioning the router itself to a better space and/or getting 802.11ac adapters for devices that don't innately support it - AC gets really good reception in most instances anyway so an extender shouldn't really be needed in a lot of scenarios. If you still somehow need additional coverage I'd say you're better off running a cat6a or cat7 cable to a switch and cabling your devices to that instead of relying on extending the wireless, if you can at all help it.
You're better off, sure, but that's not realistic for a lot of folks. The better option is to go into the mesh space with Eero, or ubiquiti if you're confident.