[SOLVED] Are new routers poor performers?

[Azor]

Working from home I needed to upgrade the Modem for higher internet speed and I thought upgrading my router it may be a good idea. It was not, at least for NETGEAR Nighthawk AX5200 Wi-Fi 6 Router (RAX48) I bought.
Here is the comparison: Second floor my seven years old current Nighthawk AC1700 model R7000 signal strength is 85-90% and connection speed 433 Mbps (using Netgear A6100 Genie USB adaptor). New router AX5200 signal strength is 70-75% and connection speed 195 Mbps. Huge degradation.
My one-year-old tablet cannot detect the 5G signal and the only option is to connect on 2.4G. I moved it to the first floor and I was able to connect to 5G, but it lost signal upstairs.
At first floor where my old R7000 measure 100% signal strength regardless of location while AX5200 signal strength was 70 to 95% depending on location. Also, I have an old laptop that is connecting on 2.4G only, the R7000 connection speed was 150Mbps while AX5200 cannot go higher than 72Mbps. In basement the R7000 signal strength was solid 100% regardless of location, while the AX5200 delivered just 50-70% depending on location. I believe that if I buy the cheapest router, below $40 I may get same or better performance than AX5200. I mention that I have not changed the Modem & Router location, just unplug the old router and wire the new one. I will return today the AX5200.
How would you rate my current R7000 performance? Do I need a replacement, or better say are there on the market better routers? And if there are, it worth the investment? Can I notice an improvement?
If my router dies tomorrow what can I buy to be al least similar performance to current R7000?

 

[bill001g]

This is extremely complex topic. The short answer is the power output is regulated by the government and most quality routers put out very close to the legal maximum.

What gets extremely messy is how this power level is measured. They way they calculate the power output from a mulitple antenna system is different than a single antenna system. This is what you see called MIMO in the router advertising. The power output also is measured slightly differently based on both the width of the radio bands as well as the forms of encoding used. 802.11ax uses 160mhz bands and attempt to use qam1024 encoding. There is also issues of trying to avoid weather radar when you try to use 160mhz of continuous radio spectrum.

It all really doesn't matter all manufactures must measure it all the same way, that is the reason the fcc exists. All manufactures will attempt to transmit at as high a level as they legally can.

To really know you would have to go and read the reports they must submit to the FCC and compare the different unit you are considering. They are massively complex documents and I have a master degree in engineering.

When these units first came out some of the very earily units were lower powered. As this technology has progressed they have all figured out...ie stolen from each other...how to hit the legal maximums. Maybe some unkown brands still have to catch up but it will soon be like 802.11ac where everything is the same pretty much other than firmware features.

I would not buy anything for at least 6 months unless you have no choice. Wifi6e should be much more available then. Asus has one router that I don't even know if you can buy yet and there is 1 intel nic card that was announced. Wifi6e is going to be a massive things for wifi. There is a huge amount of bandwidth on the 6g radio band so for a while neighbors will not stomp on each other. On 5g radio band in most counties it is impossible to run wifi6 without overlapping the neighbors because of limited amount of bandwidth.

The best solution for speed is to not use wifi. Use ethernet if you can. If you have tv coax in both rooms you can consider moca. The newer moca can get very close to gigabit speeds.

 

[Azor]

Thank you bill001g for your answer. I understand all this, I am a technical person, but the signal strength may not explain why same computer speed is 433 Mbps with the old router and just 195 Mbps with the new router. Considering the small signal strength degradation (from 85-90% to 70-75%) it may be something else to explain the lack of performance of the new router.
I will follow your advise not the buy anything until the Wifi6e will be more common and its efficiency proofed. However, the new routers price almost double compared to 7-10 years ago. We pay extra for useless features as Apps connection or Alexa. Will somebody ever ask Alexa to turn Wi-Fi on or off?

 

[bill001g]

What I have seen test reports say in areas where you have a lot of competition for bandwidth you can actually get faster speeds if you use a smaller channel width with less interference. When you use 160mhz channels you may get so many errors it runs slower than say a 40mhz channel with few errors. Maybe force the new router to not use 802.11ax. I know you can limit the channel width but I am unsure how you prevent it from using other features. By the time I considered wifi6 stuff I saw they were working on wifi6e about a yr ago so I never bought one. Is there a way to force it only run 802.11ac.

Your routers maybe running different radio channels, unless you manually set them. That by itself could be the issue.

Then again wifi is so strange. You get 2 routers that use exactly the same radio chips and pretty much the same physical case that get difference performance in houses. Problem is in someone else house the results can be reversed. This is why almost every review of wifi equipment both buyers as well as many professional reviews means very little. The environment it is in seems to have much more impact than the details of hardware. I know many times silly stuff like moving a router a small amount in a room can change the performance a lot.

 

[gggplaya]

You have to be careful with new routers. They use new SOC chipsets, which require new firmware to be integrated into their operating systems. These new chipsets can be buggy for well over a year after launch and performance may not be there either. The R7000 has a tried and true broadcom chipset that everyone has known how to use for years because all of the other high end routers at the time were using the same exact SOC.

Netgear used to be a good brand, one of the best consumer brands to get with awesome firmware back in the day. However, in the past few years I've seen their software go way down hill. It's extremely buggy and unstable. Go look at reviews for all of their routers, you'll see many bad review, far more bad reviews than should be acceptable. I wouldn't buy them these days.

I'd stick with Asus because they use a modified version of OpenWRT for their routers and they actually work with MERLIN to provide a fully featured advanced firmware for some of their routers: https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/

What ISP speed did you move up to? If you're working from home and have other people using it as well. Asus with Merlin has FQ_CODEL QOS support, which really helps to traffic shape bandwidth evenly among users and applications. Works exceptionally well, but uses alot of CPU power. ARM routers can only really handle 300-400mbps at best when using FQ_CODEL. You need an x86 cpu router to fully traffic shape higher speeds.

 

[Azor]

You have to be careful with new routers. They use new SOC chipsets, which require new firmware to be integrated into their operating systems. These new chipsets can be buggy for well over a year after launch and performance may not be there either. The R7000 has a tried and true broadcom chipset that everyone has known how to use for years because all of the other high end routers at the time were using the same exact SOC.

Netgear used to be a good brand, one of the best consumer brands to get with awesome firmware back in the day. However, in the past few years I've seen their software go way down hill. It's extremely buggy and unstable. Go look at reviews for all of their routers, you'll see many bad review, far more bad reviews than should be acceptable. I wouldn't buy them these days.

I'd stick with Asus because they use a modified version of OpenWRT for their routers and they actually work with MERLIN to provide a fully featured advanced firmware for some of their routers: https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/

What ISP speed did you move up to? If you're working from home and have other people using it as well. Asus with Merlin has FQ_CODEL QOS support, which really helps to traffic shape bandwidth evenly among users and applications. Works exceptionally well, but uses alot of CPU power. ARM routers can only really handle 300-400mbps at best when using FQ_CODEL. You need an x86 cpu router to fully traffic shape higher speeds.

Thank you for your thoughts. I shouldn't buy a Netgear to begin with. I do have a bad experience with Netgear support. This happened 7 years ago just a few days after the 90 days Netgear support ended. I asked for advise since my router was malfunctioning: 2.4GHz channel was dead and the 5 GHz worked intermittently. I was told that if I pay for support it is not guaranteed my problem is fixed. But they advise me to contact a private firm they recommend, the best one that 100% will solve my issue. It is true the cost is $300/hour, but I may need just 2-3 hours. I thanked them and I hung up before they tried to give me the contact info. I fixed it myself. I switched the router attached hard drive from USB 3.0 port to 2.0 port and since then my router is working perfect. I forgot this episode, cannot explain why I bought a new Netgear.

The current ISP speed is 30Mbps download and 5 upload. I know it is low but it perfectly work since March when I started working from home. Just a few weeks ago it significantly degraded. And I am a big live stream consumer. I run at the same time at least two IPTVs the whole day plus in the evening Netflix. Tomorrow I will receive my new Modem, a TC4400 - Broadcom 3390 chipset. I consider two options: 75Mbps download and 10 upload and 100Mbps download and 15 upload.

Is it possible my current R7000 router to handle very well the max 30 Mbps speed I have now, but if I connect it to 100Mps to reduce significantly its efficiency? In this case I may have to look at the Asus - Merlin option you suggest.

 

[gggplaya]

You can use the AdvancedTomato firmware with the R7000 and it uses FQ_Codel QOS traffic shaping as well. Should be able to traffic shape 100mbps.

AdvancedTomato :: Open Source Broadcom Firmware

AdvancedTomato offers a choice to upgrade your router's GUI to a new, Flat UI a like design, with Tomato by Shibby features and most importantly new way of look.

advancedtomato.com

You may not need to upgrade internet, 30mbps is "just enough" for what you're doing and the FQ_Codel algorithm will keep your network honest by throttling everyone fairly.

Just make sure you set your max download and upload speed to 85% of what your ISP gives you.

 

[Azor]

When I reinstalled my R7000 router back after I returned the AX5200, I made the mistake to upgrade the firmware to the latest. Since then, about every hour there is no internet access for about one minute (it looks it is not a router reboot). Never happened this in the past. Overwriting the firmware to the latest known stable version 1.0.9.42 partially helped. Blackouts repeats every 5-6 hours. I do not suspect a hardware problem, the latest firmware version may be on purpose "a killer". These too good oldies may be a brake in selling the newest Netgear low performers routers (and likely high profit products).
I bought an Asus RT-AC86U and its performance is identical to the old Netgear R7000. I did not consider an AX since this standard is full of bugs that may never be fixed. At this time the manufacturers are focusing on the new 6e standard and 6ax may remain an unfinished job. I hope I am wrong, but my experience with Netgear AX5200 confirms, at lest for Netgear products.

 

[bill001g]

To some extent it is surprising the asus is not faster than the r7000. It is likely your end devices limiting your speed on wifi. The asus has support for 4x4 mimo on 5g and also support for a non standard data encoding that is similar to wifi6 but if you end devices do not have support then the features have little value.

The cpu in the asus box is one of the highest clock rate cpu you can get which means if you were to use some of the other software features in the devices it should outperform the other router. The key feature this router cpu has that almost no other consumer router has is it includes a hardware encryption accelerator instructions. This router can easily do 200mbps of openvpn where other routers will barely get 20mbps.

This is also the cpu asus uses in the new wifi6e router but there are very little details.

I would load the merlin image on your asus, if you are like most people you will never go back to stock after using it.

 

[Azor]

My evaluation was very basic. In fact my intention was just an assessment between the old R7000 and the new Netgear AX5200. I compared the signal strength and the speed the computers are connecting to the router. These two basic parameters were good enough to conclude that the AX5200 is a very poor performer in AC standard.
Asus RT-AC86U performance is similar only related to the two above parameters. I do not have a benchmark tool for in deep evaluation. However I noticed a big improvement in latency time.