Gigabit Wireless? Five 802.11ac Routers, Benchmarked

[CaedenV]

[citation][nom]master9716[/nom]No actually , If you transfer from hardrive to hardrive you probably get a max output of 45MB/s The asus is close to 35MB/s wich is almost maxing out ur drives power. Ofcourse if you have a good performance you can get upto 80MB/s or a little more Not counting SSD to SSD transfer rates- Also remember that you will be able to transfer 4k HD content with the same amount of data that 1080p took[/citation]
Wireless speeds being too slow or too fast depends entirely on what you are doing with it.

Modern HDDs are actually pretty quick, and can easily have a minimum speed north of 50MB/s. I just purchased some 3TB drives, and they bench at a sustained sequential throughput of 225MB/s each (and these are bottom of the barrel big Seagates, nothing special). I realize that is not 'real world performance', but to say that HDDs (even 3-5 year old HDDs) can only put out 45MB/s is a bit misinformed. When it comes to workloads where you are trying to work with assets that reside on the server then the answer would be no, 11ac is not really fast enough... even wired GbE is often not fast enough anymore. And once you start talking about SSD laden servers then even 10GbE is no longer adequate. I seriously hope that the (relatively) cheap 1-2TB SSDs that come out this next year will push network device manufacturers to come up with something faster than GbE for home Ethernet networks... Even 4GbE would be a huge step forward over the nearly 14 year old GbE standard we are working with right now.

But then again, that is not what wireless is typically for in the first place. When it comes to streaming real time content (like music or HD movies), or working with small network files, for multiple end-users then 11g simply does not do the trick. 11n is 'fast enough' for such workloads, and 11ac gives a little breathing room, or space for cross-talk between multiple interfering networks without giving up too much performance. Those are what 11ac is really for, and for those uses it should get us through the next 5-10 years until something better comes along.

But then again, if all you only have 2-3 wireless devices, and they just need access to the internet, then even 11g can be overkill. Your standard DSL connection is only 5Mb/s, and even cable connections tend to cap out at 30Mb/s, and so for those workloads a good old fashioned 802.11g router has more than enough bandwidth to not introduce any slowdown in service, and as you cannot find 11g routers anymore (new at least) then the stock 150Mb/s 11n router is quite overkill for most home users.


When it comes down to it, 11ac is really a niche product. It is literally too fast for simple internet sharing, but not fast enough for using large network resources which really need a wired connection. The only thing it is really good for is giving faster network speed for all of these new devices that are too thin to cram a traditional Ethernet port on. It will give portable devices in the range of phones to ultrabooks something faster (if not fast enough) to use so that hardware manufacturers can cut out another part from the build list. For that it should be great, and as I need to replace my wireless router soon I may jump on one so that my future devices will be able to connect without issue... But as a good N device seems almost as good, I think I will wait for a 2nd gen 11ac device to come out first.
But outside of that, N is adequate for internet and most file streaming, and if you really need something faster, then you need wired Ethernet anyways, so 11ac does not make a whole lot of sense for most people unless it comes down in price.

 

[Guest]

and when 802.11 ad comes out next year we'll all be looking like a bunch of freakin idiots for buying ac stuff.

 

[CaedenV]

[citation][nom]billehbawb[/nom]and when 802.11 ad comes out next year we'll all be looking like a bunch of freakin idiots for buying ac stuff.[/citation]
Network standards do not change so quickly, so there is not much to worry about

11a and 11b both came out about the same time for separate markets, and lasted 6 years
11g was the standard for 6 years, and (sadly?) most wireless networks still use 11g because of the huge amount of devices that still saturate peoples homes (my own included).
11n will be almost 7 years old when 11ac is finally ratified, and it was only the earliest of adopters who got burnt on buying something before the standard was set, and 11n will still be 'good enough' for a looong time.

Buying an 11ac router today is not likely to burn you because most changes in the standard can be upgraded via a firmware update (ie the protocol may change a little, but the bands and technology is set), and wireless standards only change every 6 years, so you have the 6 years before it is replaced, plus however long before you start using devices that support whatever comes next.

802.11ad (WiGig) will not be for consumer internet markets. In fact, it is further along in the standardization process than 11ac is at the moment. But just like 11a was mostly for corporate or specialty networks, 11ad will also be for special uses. Where 11ac will be for internet and file sharing, 11ad will be for things like wireless displays and other dedicated point-to-point style connections (though the standard supports more general use as well, but the industry is not moving that direction).

Just as 11a was difficult to access because of the cost of the 5GHz radio, 11ad will be hard to deploy on a large scale because of the 60GHz radio. If the radio tech gets cheaper over the next 6 years, then it will be brought over for general use on the next gen wireless standard, otherwise we may not see it for a while.
Or put another way; Just as 1st gen (and cheap) 11n devices were only 2.4GHz and brought only marginal performance gains to 11g, affordable 11ad devices would not have the 60GHz radio, and would be stuck on 11ac speeds anyways.

 

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]fwupow[/nom]The other beef I have with routers is that they're terrible with the way they split up bandwidth between multiple devices. Instead of responsively reassigning bandwidth to the device that needs it, the router continues to reserve a major slice for a device that I'm not using.If you live in an apartment building, it's actually rather rude to use the full 300Mbps capacity of the wireless N band, since you may well succeed in effectively shutting your neighbor down. There's so much happening in the 2.4GHz band nowadays, it's unreal. Your own cordless keyboards/mice/controllers etc can malfunction from being unable to get a packet in edgewise.For these dual-band routers to be really useful, we need manufacturers of smartphones, tablets, laptops, netbook and such to build dual-band clients into them because adding the functionality with some sort of dongle just doesn't work.[/citation]

The router I have doesn't support QoS. As soon as someone uses a P2P program, game over for a any gaming, because the ping to a server 50 miles away will spike from 40ms to 900ms, with around 5% of packet loss.

 

[A Bad Day]

EDIT: And it doesn't even properly support 802.11n, as in, it doesn't have enough processing power or memory.

 

[overfocused]

The time to jump is when one actually needs it. Wireless G is more than enough for all the devices in my house, let alone N.

I'll go ac when it costs $80 not $250.

 

[MU_Engineer]

I see a lot of people talking about streaming video to their HTPCs. I never really understood why most people would use wireless to do that job when wired connections are much faster, more reliable, and range from about the same price (ethernet over coax) to much much cheaper (stringing up some ethernet cable.) It isn't like you move your 40"+ monitor around a lot, and many people only really have one TV they watch most of their TV on, which is generally directly connected directly to the HTPC. I am sure there are some corner cases out there but most people would be better served with some sort of a hard-wired connection. However, I could understand how the wireless would be good if you watched all of your TV on a laptop as those do tend to move around a bit.

 

[jrazor247]

Review was primarily focused on ac radio performance & throughput,  so I guess we'll wait till more routers come out to do a feature comparison.  I'll be waiting for not only the standard to be formalized, but some months to prove its security.  Would have liked your opinion using a more typical multi-device usage scenario- like two HD streams, plus File transfer, internet download & gaming.  Higher frequencies mean smaller, fancier antennas, no idea what beam forming is, can we attach high gain or directional antennas for an improvement? As others have mentioned of interest- ping/latency times, teaming/port bonding, switching fabric capacity.  I liked the interview with industry people, good work!

 

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]MU_Engineer[/nom]I see a lot of people talking about streaming video to their HTPCs. I never really understood why most people would use wireless to do that job when wired connections are much faster, more reliable, and range from about the same price (ethernet over coax) to much much cheaper (stringing up some ethernet cable.) It isn't like you move your 40"+ monitor around a lot, and many people only really have one TV they watch most of their TV on, which is generally directly connected directly to the HTPC. I am sure there are some corner cases out there but most people would be better served with some sort of a hard-wired connection. However, I could understand how the wireless would be good if you watched all of your TV on a laptop as those do tend to move around a bit.[/citation]

Kinda hard (and ugly) to wire cheaply if the router is in another room or on a different floor.

Plus, the routers could also be used in public, where it's not uncommon for people to attempt to watch movies on their phones or tablets.

 

[fausto412]

I have the Linksys router EA6500 and also own an E4200v2(same as EA4500) and I have to say the EA6500 was not ready for the market. Even today things don't work 100%. I am hoping Linksys gets on it and fixes the bugs pronto! This is their flagship hardware, it needs to be flawless. Range is much worse than my E4200V2 and my house is small.

 

[Guest]

In response to this quote:

“From what I have read here, it looks like [Ixia] have implemented (by hand) their own version of TCP (with ACKs, sliding windows, and retransmissions) on top of UDP. Quote: ‘...This datagram protocol is a subset of the functionality TCP provides to ensure that data is received reliably....’ Which doesn’t really make sense to me, as no one in real life would do this. If you want a reliable connection, then you use TCP. If you want a lossy connection, then you use UDP. If I understand their paper, they are really measuring two different versions of TCP, the full Winsock implementation and their own custom coded TCP-like protocol.”

Microsoft's Mediaroom IPTV platform uses a custom mix of TCP and UDP for multicast streams. At&t's U-Verse and many other telco's cable offerings uses mediaroom. In cases like this, where multiple servers are mulicasting hundreds of video streams to thousands of remote set top boxes, this works well because the vast majority of clients will get packets without issues, but the few that don't can re-request packets on the fly to insure smooth playback. TCP alone would have too much overhead, UDP alone would have too many dropped packets. This is not really applicable to home users, but extremely important to At&T engineers going over RFP's from various router/gateway vendors.

 

[palladin9479]

Something I don't see discussed in these articles is support for Wireless Distribution System (WDS). WDS is absolutely a requirement for large homes these days. Having everything in the house connect to a single AP, in a single room 70+ feet away is dumb. Instead install WDS enabled AP's (not repeaters) at key points around the home, they all form a mesh network and enable you to get full signal anywhere in the house. The guys at DD-WRT are looking to support the Asus model, if they could get it working then it would have WDS support and I would be buying a few of these.

For those asking about how messy it is to cable your home, that is why you want WDS support. Two AP's can act as high speed bridges and allow you to connection from much further out, could also do some fancy work with signals. Have one area's clients connect on one band while pushing that traffic out on a different band.

 

[SteelCity1981]

3) Internet performance: I have 'decently fast' internet at my home, but that is still only ~25Mb/s. But when wireless G is at 54Mb/s it makes it rather hard to justify getting anything faster than G for your average home user that is simply using wireless on 1-3 devices for internet access, and there is very little file sharing going on. Are there any real-world tests to show some significant performance boost for such simple 'internet only' uses? Perhaps lower ping rates, or more consistent performance at that 25Mb/s level?

You do realize that 54MB doesn't equal 54 megabytes. 54MB is 54 megabits which equals around 6.7Mb or megabytes throughput and since a lot of people have highspeed connections faster then 6.7mb now wireless N was needed. At the time when Wireless G mcame out it was plenty fast enough considering most highspeed data lines were throughputing on 1 to 3Mb's but by te time Wireless N came out with cable modems etc that were offering 7 to 10mb's throughput N was needed. Now you have super highsped internet ike fiber optics that are capable of upwords of 100 Mb's throughput. Even though 100mb is still exotic to the home user and pretty costly in the next few years 100Mb's throughput connection will be coming down in price and will be more within the afforable range like what we are starting to see now with 50Mb throughput connections. So is wireless AC needed at this point? Yes if you are running a super highspeed connection faster then 50Mb's and if you have AC compatible devices which is another big factor to consider But If you are running anything below 50Mb's connection then and have no wireless devices that are AC compatible then no.

 

[icepick314]

I'm using Asus RT-AC66U and PCE-AC66 combo.

I wanted to have better wifi than Verizon Fios router could give me.

Transfer speed over wifi usually tops out around 3-4MB/s.

I'm using Windows 8 Pro with Media Center and the driver for PCI-E card worked without any hitch.

Now I can transfer files from file server downstairs to my main PC upstairs around 45-55MB/s which I've NEVER seen on wifi before.

I don't know if these draft ac will get any faster but so far it's pretty damm fast for me and have no problem streaming even 1080 videos.

p.s. Yes that's MB, not Mb. Windows File Explorer gives out transfer speed in MB.

 

[bigstonebang]

How can Toms hardware recommend this router? How can a brand new flag ship router be allowed to get away with USB 2?

I need to replace an old linksys router, and you know what I'm going to use? ASUS RT-N65U, why? Because this router doesn't have USB 3, id love to future proof with 802.11ac (especially because this products wireless performance is so strong) but the truth is, when the replacement gets pluged in a USB 3 drive will be connected to it immediately and ac adapters will take a long time.

if USB 3 is standard on cheap dell insprons why does a brand new $190 router leave it out?

 

[Scotty99]

I have an old ass router and im not even sure what band it is (G, N, AC. Its all gibberish to me). Here is my router, should i be upgrading for any particular reason?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122016

My download from my ISP is 30mb's. I use my router for the laptop in the living room, about 30 feet away.

Is a router a product that does not need to be upgraded unless you are changing the way you use your internet?

 

[kartu]

Does existing technology work well for you guys?

Even N is troublesome for me, with Lenovo notebook 5 meters away from the router (same floor).

For bulk transfers it works just fine. But gaming is a non-stop lag fest. So my "solution" so far is N if I download stuff/watch HD video, G if SC2 playing.

 

[k7mm]

So they are just bonding channels?

 

[jn77]

[citation][nom]Scotty99[/nom]I have an old ass router and im not even sure what band it is (G, N, AC. Its all gibberish to me). Here is my router, should i be upgrading for any particular reason? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6833122016My download from my ISP is 30mb's. I use my router for the laptop in the living room, about 30 feet away.Is a router a product that does not need to be upgraded unless you are changing the way you use your internet?[/citation]

You would get some sort of speed boost over wireless if you upgrades (if you watch HD video over wireless or game over wireless.

Also if you router is behind a bunch of walls, limiting your signal to the room you are in, you would notice a difference.

In your situation I would say, its a 50/50 thing. You may not need it, but it would be an improvement. It will also have new security technology so it would be safer against hacking if you properly setup the firewall in a newer router.

Ultimately its up to you what you want to do.

 

[williamvw]

[citation][nom]Kaldor[/nom]What were they using for a wireless network adapter on the client side?[/citation]
"In all tests, the server connected to the router under test via gigabit Ethernet. The client connected to a spare Netgear R6300 in bridge mode for 2.4 GHz testing or a Cisco Linksys WUMC710 bridge for 802.11ac work, also via gigabit Ethernet. The directional orientation of the routers and bridges was kept consistent for all tests."

 

[williamvw]

[citation][nom]chuckchurch[/nom]Exactly. The 'client' adapter they used if anyone didn't catch it was a Cisco/Linksys router-sized device. Not practical by any means. It'd be totally insane to make any product recommendations prior to real client adapters being available, or more accurately, embedded ones are available. I think a wireless salesman wrote this article.[/citation]
Guaranteed, I'm not a wireless salesman, but thanks for believing I could aspire above my current pay grade. ;-)

Would I use one of these routers as a wireless client adapter on the road, or even in my bed? No way. But I had a choice when planning this article: wait months and months and months for the industry to finally start planting 11ac into notebooks or go ahead and start working with the adapter choices that were already available. Our purpose was to illustrate current router performance levels. To that end, we had to worth with what was possible at the time.

 

[williamvw]

[citation][nom]phate[/nom]Are all these routers fully backwards compatible? I would assume so... Anyway I would have like to seen results with some other devices running b/g/n adapters. Most networks - in my experience - are some sort of hodgepodge of different devices. So ac speeds are only really relevant if the results also translate over to the other spaces.[/citation]
Well, keep in mind that, in effect, the Netgear client running in bridge mode *is* a 2.4 GHz 802.11n adapter. I don't have data, but in case anyone is interested, I actually left the Linksys running in my kitchen downstairs as a dual-band AP since writing this article. It's been totally fine connecting everything from phones to Ultrabooks in both bands.

 

[williamvw]

[citation][nom]CaedenV[/nom]Hey William, I have a few questions for a followup article ...[/citation]
Hi, Caeden. Many thanks for the kind words. If I ever get to take a vacation, I'm going to nominate you as my ghost writer, OK? Your questions are great. My answers may not be.

1. Wired performance. This is in my list of possible topics to hit in a follow-up piece. The hard reality is that just getting the data contained in this story took several days of testing and follow-up with vendors. (For those of you questioning some of the low numbers, yes, I vetted many of my results past several vendors for analysis and confirmation.) Could I have added wired performance into the mix? Sure, and I might return to that later. But I didn't have the bandwidth to do it in this piece, which topped 9,000 words as it was.

2. High traffic. I believe you're talking about airtime fairness here, and you've hit another item on the follow-up list. I'll defer back to my prior time/bandwidth excuse, plus I'll add that setting up airtime fairness tests are even more labor-intensive. They're also very much worth exploring. When the average U.S. home already has five connected devices, issues like these need more attention. I'm considering taking the top three performers from this article and hitting them with some of these additional tests. Stay tuned, I guess.

3. Internet performance. Are there real-world cases for having more than 54 Mbps wireless (which is really 20-25 Mbps) when you have a 25 Mbps Net connection? If your whole reason to have a LAN is to connect to the Internet, then no, not really. I sure wouldn't bother. Personally, I do most of my storage on a NAS, though, so I care about network file speeds. LAN gaming? Obvious. There are many use cases that demand faster speeds -- just not that one. Although...keep in mind that wireless speeds can vary by huge amounts. Sometimes, your 11g adapter might only be pulling in 20-50% of its optimum. Would you rather have 20-50% of 25 Mbps or of 150 Mbps? Just saying, a little leg room never hurts.

4. Mobile power savings. Dang, NICE question...and totally outside my research. I would probably go back to Broadcom on this. In fact... There. I just copied and sent your question to my Broadcom PR reps. Let's see if an answer comes back.

 

[milktea]

[citation][nom]bigstonebang[/nom]How can a brand new flag ship router be allowed to get away with USB 2?[/citation]
Have you actually tried using the RT-N65U? The USB3 on the router doesn't operate like the USB3 on your computer. The USB3 operates like a USB2. In fact, I've also tried one other router (Netgear or Linksys, couldn't remember) with USB3. And it's a disappointment. I don't know if it's a firmware issue, or the hardware SOC problem. But the USB ports are painfully slow.

The Giga Eth port is much faster than the USB3.0 labeled port on the router. So for any large file transfers, it's better to use the Giga Eth or Wifi dual band.

 

[serendipiti]

I see 160Mhz channels useful for network bridging on "clean" areas where you need that bandwidth or to warrant that bandwidth to the proper number of clients/bandwidth.
I think is very positive to get some respectable speed jump with improved connection reliability and versatility.