NETGEAR Nighthawk R7000 slower than CenturyLink Fiber Router? 1 gig fiber.

[Sintilla]

I don't know which model router I have for CenturyLink.. it's a 10 dollar a month rental.

The Nighthawk I got seemed to do much better with great WiFi coverage around my whole house when I had my 175/12 Comcast Connection.. I had a constant full bar WiFi on all my cellphones and laptops.

Fast forward to 3 months ago, CenturyLink came and upgraded me to 1gig up and down.
(It's great with the exception of I've never seen more than 55mb/s download but that must be the servers I'm using)

Anyways, to the test I did for the speeds;

Nighthawk Router plugged into the wall and was getting 220 mbps/220mbps down and up.

I plugged in the CenturyLink router @ 5ghz and I got 350/350 down and up.. so way faster right? Yes, but for the lack of a better word.. it's sloppy. It's dips a lot, and doesn't have much distance around the house. Aka it wasn't consistent. My SmartTV was having troubles getting a steady connection as well?

If my R7000 has way more coverage around the house, why doesn't the speed match as advertised?
Also, I tried direct ethernet into the router and was getting around 450mbps HARD WIRED. Yet I get 960 mbps on the other CenturyLink router.

The R7000 should be good for 1900mbps.
The guy who installed it said my router was worse than what he was installing, but I just don't like the coverage much.


Any help would be appreciated.

tldr; my old expensive router is slower including direct hard wired (half the speed but advertised 1900mpbs) and new CenturyLink router (modem built into it as well) is faster but has less coverage and is spotty.

Small update:

According to this: http://kmwoley.com/blog/bypassing-needless-centurylink-wireless-router-on-gigabit-fiber/

R7000 are only able to reach 450mpbs.. (which doesn't make sense, but its the same thing I experienced)... Hmm. What router WOULD be able to handle?

 

[bill001g]

You only want to test with ethernet cables. Wireless is a huge lie. 1900 is some magic number that they add the speed of the 2 radios together but you can only do that if you run 2 end device. The end device can not use both radios at the same time. Next the devices are all half duplex and they are adding the send and receive rates together. They also assume no re transmission which is never going to happen in the real world.

Not sure how you manged to get 350 on wireless from the century link. Only some of the top end routers can get anywhere near that on testing sites and it is not really a valid test because it assumes you can get a nic that has 4 antenna which is extremely rare. Be very happy if you can get 200m on wireless and that likely will be in the same room.

The r7000 should be able to get 900+ just like the centurylink on a ethernet connection. A number of testing sites have gotten that rate.

 

[Nafryti]

yeah, the WiFi number saying "speeds up to blah blah" is the total combined shared speed across all devices, like four 150mbps = 600mbps so they advertise 600 instead of 150, cuz we're just cattle and think the bigger number means better...

I think the actual speed you can max out on is 300mbps over wifi, and instead of increasing the actual speed, like CPU's went multicore, routers went MIMO, and now have combined achieved speeds of up to 1900mbps which is to say... look, you can have 4 devices running at 300mbps and 4 devices running at 150mbps that equals 1900mbps, so lets say it can do that! Its because they are using more radios to actively share the internet through, instead of one radio queuing four devices, it uses multiple radios to connect to multiple devices simultaneously. Pretty sure its called MIMO... that was something that used to be advertised quite a bit back in the day of .11g superiority... now its a free cafe speed lol.

The only real world speed test you should do is hardwired. and even then its a guess as to how fast you really are through the internet, these tests all test quantity and not frequency... or does it... i've never understood that... like why do i care if i can transfer a 20GB file in less than 30s, i want my data to leave my computer and arrive halfway across the country in less than 1ms... make that happen. mkay?

i wouldn't mind paying for something like... "travel time from SF to NY, .0000004ms" that's a service I WANT. not this larger packet per second. I want more packets per second.