Question Realistic WiFi download/upload speed?

[sms1295]

I have a 1Gig/1Gig internet plan and a TP-Link Archer AX6600 router. I've seen different information as to what the Wifi 5GHz download/upload speed should be. I doing the 5GHz speed test with only my laptop which is about 10 feet from the router. The speed test with an ethernet cable to my laptop averages 940 Mbps download and 935 Mbps. What speeds can I realistically expect when testing the 5GHz band with my laptop?

Thanks,

sms1295

 

[bill001g]

It depends on exactly the wifi card. My guess would be maybe 300mbps fairly close to the router and about 1/2 that at a more common usage distance.

This has sorta been the scam that wifi6 is. Even though you have a fancy router most end devices do not fully support all the wifi6 ability. The key problem is all the rules about using 160mhz radio bands and avoiding things like weather radar. The vast majority of end devices only support 80mhz which is the same as wifi5. This is the key reason most people saw very little difference when they bought wifi6. In addition things like laptops only have 2 antenna so they can't use all the fancy encoding that the router supports.

Now this assumes that your pc actually support wifi6 to begin with. But it still should fall in the 150-300mbps range.


Now if you were to have a wifi6 device that could actually use 160mhz you might get 600mbps if you were lucky. Those test results shown by router manufactures getting close to 1gbit are using very uncommon wifi nic cards that have say 4 antenna and these are desktop machines.

 

[lantis3]

My two 802.1ac wifi 5 & one wifi 6 cards all connect to the router at 866.7Mbps (router's top speed) less than 5ft away,

doing network testiing all of them fall below 200Mbps, however.

 

[bill001g]

Numbers like 866.7 are not actual speeds, there are more theoretical things that would only work in some unrealistic lan test.

What these more represent is what is called a MCS value. These let you figure out details about the connection. There are massive mcs tables that let you see what these numbers mean and details matter 867.1 for example is a very different combination.

866.7 represent that you are using 80mhz radio bands. You have strong enough signal that you can cleanly pass data using QAM256 data encoding. You are also using 2 overlapping mimo radio signals.

But again these are more math numbers than data rates. They ignore things like wifi is half duplex and there are many bits used for error correction and detection that is taken away from the total the end user can use. It also assume you can transmit 2 overlapping signal with no interference and get say double the bandwidth. If that was true we could just run 100x100 mimo and have unlimited wifi speed.

 

[sms1295]

Thank you for the responses. When I asked the forum on the TP-Link website, the response I got was that I should receive about the same download/upload speed testing with a Wifi connection at my test distance as I do with an ethernet connection. I found their response interesting because the senior tech I was working with to resolve my Wifi issue said that the Wifi speed would be 10% to 30% less than the ethernet speed from the start and then decrease the further the device is from the router.

I'm testing with an Alienware M17 R2 at 10 ft from the router. The wifi card is a Killer AX1650w with wireless standards of Wi-FI, Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6. The test with the 5GHz band consistently gives a download speed of 550 Mbps and and upload speed of 900 Mbps.

Once again thank you for the response, each has been more informative than what the TP-Link forum has provided.

sms1295