[SOLVED] Router WR941HP is 450Mbps but barely reach 100mbps

Dasa

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Hello,

I have WR941HP and it is advertised as 2.4 GHz 450 Mbps (802.11n)

at the same time all it's ports are:
1× 10/100 Mbps WAN Port
4× 10/100 Mbps LAN Ports

The best I could get from wifi was 75 download 92 upload, RSSI is 35-37 average signal quality is 100

1st question

How can it reach 450 when it's wired ports are 100 only?

2nd question

Why download is less than upload no matter how many times I test it while download in wires are equal to upload and always full speed of original router?

Info:
My wifi adapter is TP-link TL-WN7200ND (high power USB adapter 150Mbps)
This router is connected to main router with Cat6 and gets full speed up and down
Internet speed is 300Mbps
 
Solution
I thought the higher QAM the better from what I saw in that data sheet? the numbers were getting bigger going towards QAM 1024... I guess I didn't understand the sheet.

I understand what you say, in the least I thought it can provide 2400 watts if the wifi adapter needed it, like any device it can consume low watts or high watts depending on settings and you need the port to be able to give enough power if needed.

I honestly never understood how they control the power output, I always thought by changing region you would do that, I mean every country has it's own rules, or do they make special batches for USA that is complying with US rules for example? or do they use driver to control the output and block it in settings, I always...

Dasa

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  1. WiFi performance has nothing to do with LAN performance
  2. The "450mbps WiFi" is a theoretical best case. Your house may vary. And does.

1. If the device ports are all 100Mbps and I provide the router with 300Mbps directly to WAN, how can it give more than 100? how is this not related?

2. well 70-90 is too far from 450, it can't even reach close to 150! with RSSI of 35!
 

USAFRet

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1. If the device ports are all 100Mbps and I provide the router with 300Mbps directly to WAN, how can it give more than 100? how is this not related?

2. well 70-90 is too far from 450, it can't even reach close to 150! with RSSI of 35!
  1. That "450mbps" is between your system and the router. One of the many lies they foist upon us.
  2. Yes, 70-90 is poor. But that's WiFi for ya. Distance and house construction has a MAJOR impact.
 
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You have to learn how they make up these numbers.

They would call a gigabit ethernet cable 2gbit because they add transmit and receive speed together. Ethernet cables can actually do that wifi is half duplex and only 1 device can actually transmit at time. In effect you get 1/2 the speed because of this.
There are many other things like this in these number they are lab numbers that you can only get in very unrealistic test cases.

If you get 70-90 on your device that is really good. Most people only get 30-40 running on the 2.4g band.
 
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Dasa

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  1. That "450mbps" is between your system and the router. One of the many lies they foist upon us.
  2. Yes, 70-90 is poor. But that's WiFi for ya. Distance and house construction has a MAJOR impact.

  1. why no one is suing them?
  2. I understand but I'm 23 feet away, I didn't know all these numbers I read on boxes are BS

You have to learn how they make up these numbers.

They would call a gigabit ethernet cable 2gbit because they add transmit and receive speed together. Ethernet cables can actually do that wifi is half duplex and only 1 device can actually transmit at time. In effect you get 1/2 the speed because of this.
There are many other things like this in these number they are lab numbers that you can only get in very unrealistic test cases.

If you get 70-90 on your device that is really good. Most people only get 30-40 running on the 2.4g band.

I am starting to read online stuff about spatial stream and how they calculate total speed, I never heard of all this crap before and find it too complicated

So based on this I guess my 150Mbps wifi adapter is limited to 75Mbps at best? so this has to go too...

okay, suppose I want to go out and buy a new router, is there a way to find out how much speed my wifi adapter will get on speed test without getting a Phd in wifi marketing, what numbers should I seek for this?
 
okay, suppose I want to go out and buy a new router, is there a way to find out how much speed my wifi adapter will get on speed test without getting a Phd in wifi marketing, what numbers should I seek for this?
Not really you must be a educated consumer to buy these things without the marketing guys conning you into buying something that doesn't really work like they said. It actually takes a lot of study to be good at figuring out what they are really selling.

This is the table that shows what those numbers mean. Note the router manufactures also add the speeds of the radios together. So a 1200 router is 866.7 on the 5g radio which they call 900 and they add the 300 on the 2.4g radio.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...nKQ1O7abij/pubhtml?gid=1367372895&single=true

Buying a new router is only 1/2 the connection. You could go out and buy a fancy wifi6e router that has a 16000 number (ie 16gbit) and if you use your current wifi nic you would still get the same 70mbps.

Your largest bottleneck is you are running on the 2.4g radio band. The 5g radio band has much more bandwidth available. What this means is you can go from running 40mhz channels to 80mhz channels. If you look in the massive spreadsheet you will see the numbers are double doing this. Of course you don't actually get double.

This comes down to how much money you want to spend. Since you are currently using close to junk equipment I assume you do not want to spend a lot.

What I would look for is a router with a 1200-1450 number that has gigabit wan and lan ports. You would want to buy a similar nic for your machine. Note if you are going to use USB you really should have a USB3 port. USB2 ports at maximum can run 400mbps and that is also a lab number.

In any case if you are fairly close to the router with no walls you should get close to your 300mbps internet speed. You will likely get 150-200 at more normal distances with a wall or floor inbetween but this is impossible to predict. Someone who lives in a house with concrete walls will get almost no signal where someone who lives say in japan where the have basically paper walls in some house will get strong signal.
 
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Dasa

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Magic words - "Up to"

In a different room in your house, you'd get different numbers.

The same router in my house vs your house, different numbers.

My WiFi source is on the first floor at one end of the house. I can see a noticeable drop at one end of the upstairs hall vs the other end 25 feet away.

I get that but they don't say "up to" for the 450Mbps they say "up to" for two things

Up to 900*2 Square Metres
output power of up to 1000mw

and they claim this:

450M: -71dBm@10% PER
130M: -74dBm@10% PER
108M: -74dBm@10% PER
54M: -77dBm@10% PER
11M: -91dBm@8% PER
6M: -89dBm@10% PER
1M: -97dBm@8% PER


but they do say a lot of crap in the end that make them not liable?

Actual wireless data throughput and wireless coverage are not guaranteed and will vary as a result of 1) environmental factors, including building materials, physical objects, and obstacles, 2) network conditions, including local interference, volume and density of traffic, product location, network complexity, and network overhead, and 3) client limitations, including rated performance, location, connection, quality, and client condition.

Not really you must be a educated consumer to buy these things without the marketing guys conning you into buying something that doesn't really work like they said. It actually takes a lot of study to be good at figuring out what they are really selling.

This is the table that shows what those numbers mean. Note the router manufactures also add the speeds of the radios together. So a 1200 router is 866.7 on the 5g radio which they call 900 and they add the 300 on the 2.4g radio.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...nKQ1O7abij/pubhtml?gid=1367372895&single=true

Buying a new router is only 1/2 the connection. You could go out and buy a fancy wifi6e router that has a 16000 number (ie 16gbit) and if you use your current wifi nic you would still get the same 70mbps.

Your largest bottleneck is you are running on the 2.4g radio band. The 5g radio band has much more bandwidth available. What this means is you can go from running 40mhz channels to 80mhz channels. If you look in the massive spreadsheet you will see the numbers are double doing this. Of course you don't actually get double.

This comes down to how much money you want to spend. Since you are currently using close to junk equipment I assume you do not want to spend a lot.

What I would look for is a router with a 1200-1450 number that has gigabit wan and lan ports. You would want to buy a similar nic for your machine. Note if you are going to use USB you really should have a USB3 port. USB2 ports at maximum can run 400mbps and that is also a lab number.

In any case if you are fairly close to the router with no walls you should get close to your 300mbps internet speed. You will likely get 150-200 at more normal distances with a wall or floor inbetween but this is impossible to predict. Someone who lives in a house with concrete walls will get almost no signal where someone who lives say in japan where the have basically paper walls in some house will get strong signal.

Thank you for the link, this will be very useful when I understand it :LOL: ... still I can make use of it washout understanding everything

I get it now, the 2.4ghz is ancient history but those numbers on boxes fooled me for soooo long and I never understood what's wrong, which made me think I just had a lemon (broken product) so I never used the router and was afraid to sell it.

You're correct I couldn't spend too much on router, I actually made a post here when I wanted to buy one and they advised me against all of the routers I mentioned (cheap selection),
Ketchup79 recommended C90 and you warned me about "high power" marketing term and I didn't listen, well C90 was too expensive for me and I am kind of still fooled by high power term, I mean why they don't use it on everything or what is different in a device that makes it high power?

Yes you're correct I need new technology for Tx and Rx and I need USB 3 too, need to keep that in mind.

Regarding the walls, I have very fortified concrete walls , also my family built this house with too much insulation layers that seem to be killing cell phone signal and any wifi between 1st and 2nd floor, there is a tiny nokia fiber router on second floor and I never see the signal through walls, the router seem to be small in size and performance, not even covering 2n floor entirely and their nokia becon gave me cancer while using it (through windows), seriously the most horrible electronic device ever.

This caused me to listen to the advice I heard a million times before but never was able to do, I finally got wires through walls, I got electrician people to put cat6 cables and I get 100% of the speed but I still need the wifi router for coverage of mobiles, TV and 2nd PC.

Honestly once I setup this router correctly (disabling auto encryption and choosing AES, choosing 40Mhz) and doing speed test on all channels one by one the speed jumped from 50down/50up to 78down/92up, I don't know what did this, I have no neighbors like before so why channels matter is beyond me, the closest neighbor is far away and using one channel, I don't have wireless phones at home or active wireless devices as far as I can tell.

I checked the newer version of my router that supports 5Ghz (TP-Link Archer C58HP AC1350 High Power Wireless Router)

and found this video for it from Supplier in Thailand:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApDylEgHG-0


and it's not that much faster than mine, what is going on ?????
 
So I could give you another link that will make your head hurt even more if you want. You can actually find the reports wifi vendors are required to submit to the FCC. These require testing in a very controlled environment so you can actually compare numbers unlike router manufacture marketing stuff which might pick only tests where they do well.

So the maximum power allowed is 1watt in most countries. This is represented by 30db of power level. What you will find is almost every router is extremely close to that 30db number. It gets very messy because there are multiple test based on how many antenna it is using and if it is running 2.4 or 5 but in general you will not find huge difference between routers.

What you do find is the end device many times do not send out the maximum power. Thing that function on batteries (ie some cell phones) do not send out the maximum allowed power to conserve battery and they tend to have smaller antenna which also reduces the effective power to save on space. USB nic tend to also have this issue because they are primarily designed to be used on mobile devices. That is why you see those extremely tiny devices that almost fit in the USB slot, this is the very worst option for a desktop that is made out of lots of metal blocking signals.

Your problem is you are looking at the 2.4g radio band. The maximum allowed bandwidth is 40mhz. On the 5g radio band it is easier to get 80mhz radio bands and maybe if you are lucky 160mhz. wifi6e uses 6g radio where there is a massive amount of new bandwidth and can easily get 160mhz.

This pretty much double the speed each time get going form 20->40->80->160.
90mbps is actually very good on 2.4 with 40mhz.
using 80 mhz radio many people get 300 close to the router and 150-200 farther away. The 160mhz radio bands and the better encoding with wifi6/wifi6e give number in the 600mbps close to the router.
 
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Dasa

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Okay so how do I get the maximum output power from my PC? what is the best method if USB is not good?

USB is limited to 2400 mw which is way more than 1000mw so what's the problem with USB?

*I use USB adapter with 6 feet cable

So what about the video I posted, according to what you say it should be faster... it is using 5ghz but the speed is not any much better than mine, how do you explain that? shouldn't it be close to 300? or 200 at least? after all it is tested by the company itself if you have noticed?
 
Where do you get that the USB is 2400mw. That would make it illegal to use. So it either is a direct import from china and they can lie about the power because it is not being verified or the device is FCC certified which means it can not exceed 1000mw.

So what I find for the device you list is this. Note you can click on the fcc link in the page if you want to verify what they have. What you will see is this wiki says the power is 20db or 27db. That is 100mw or 501mw.

https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/TP-LINK_TL-WN7200ND

I didn't watch the video before now I am even more confused. So when I saw the download speed I suspected there was a 100mbps ethernet connection in the path but then they show more than 100mbps upload. So I then looked the specs up on that router and it
only has 100mbps lan/way port. So no matter how fast the wifi is it will be limited by the ethernet ports. This does not explain how they managed to get 115 upload to pass through a 100mbps cable. What you generally see if you were to test on ethernet cables is around 94 up and down.

If they had gigabit ports it might get the 300 close to the router. This of course assumes you use a better usb nic that you have listed.
 

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A lot of places says so (google results), I am not knowledgeable in electricity but there is a calculator for that, 500 mA with 5 volt (USB) equals 2.4 watts / 2400 mw

like this guy : https://qr.ae/pvbKJF (Quora article)

Yeah I have noticed that the wifi adaptors themselves are limited but I found Alpha brand that uses 2000mw

Sadly it's an old adapter so there is no official win10 driver, but even in windows 7 days I don't remember an option to use maximum power or minimum power

I forgot about the ethernet port speed, what you said is true about exceeding 100mbps with 10/100 ports, that's weird but I am clueless in this field, what really puzzles me is how they dare selling it with such limited port ?!?!? this is a total scam, damn you tp-link! I should boycott them from now on and to my surprise they are dominating the market even more than before, even in USA, they're the top recommended brand in many articles.

I don't really need the wifi like before since I got cat6 but I was thinking of selling my router (still selling at good price compared to new stuff) and adding more money and getting a wifi6 one

The router you saw in the previous video for is selling for same price as Archer AX20 which can reach 800mbps! wow!

my local router shop

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1Dyaesve4M
(speed test)
 
That router is a very low end wifi6 router it will not perform much better than wifi5 (802.11ac). Don't believe vendor test they likely were sitting on top of the router and in a room with no interference. Most people do not get much more than 300mbps just like wifi5. If it was a top end wifi6 router it might get 600-700 sitting on top of the router. It is using what is called QAM1024 data encoding and you are lucky if that works 5-10ft from the router.

You can't look at the power coming from the usb. That is powering the whole device. When you look at it that way you could say a computer that has a 800 watt power supply would put out 800watts of wifi. It would actually fry you sitting next to the computer. 2.4ghz is exactly the same frequency a microwave oven uses and many are only 500 watts.

The only numbers that matter are the ones I linked for your device. These numbers are verified by the FCC following very strict rules on how you test.
Unless the device is illegal they can not put out more than 1watt of power. Things like alpha and amped like to pretend their device and put out more power but when you look up the FCC numbers they are under the 1watt limit. Its not like the unknown brands from china that do not have fcc certification. The only way to get those is to import them yourself since customs does not care to enforce fcc rules for 1 device but if you imported a few thousand they would block the shipment if there was not fcc certification.
 
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  1. That "450mbps" is between your system and the router. One of the many lies they foist upon us.
  2. Yes, 70-90 is poor. But that's WiFi for ya. Distance and house construction has a MAJOR impact.

Technically they aren't lying, just being deceptive and allowing the consumer to make assumptions based on their own ignorance of the technical details. On their website, it clearly states 450mbps wireless speed numerous times, but doesn't say anything about internet speeds or lan speeds. https://www.tp-link.com/au/home-networking/high-power-router/tl-wr941hp/

It is technically capable when doing file transfers to several computers from wifi to LAN.

OP needs to buy a better router for their internet plan.
 
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A lot of places says so (google results), I am not knowledgeable in electricity but there is a calculator for that, 500 mA with 5 volt (USB) equals 2.4 watts / 2400 mw

like this guy : https://qr.ae/pvbKJF (Quora article)

Yeah I have noticed that the wifi adaptors themselves are limited but I found Alpha brand that uses 2000mw

Sadly it's an old adapter so there is no official win10 driver, but even in windows 7 days I don't remember an option to use maximum power or minimum power

I forgot about the ethernet port speed, what you said is true about exceeding 100mbps with 10/100 ports, that's weird but I am clueless in this field, what really puzzles me is how they dare selling it with such limited port ?!?!? this is a total scam, damn you tp-link! I should boycott them from now on and to my surprise they are dominating the market even more than before, even in USA, they're the top recommended brand in many articles.

I don't really need the wifi like before since I got cat6 but I was thinking of selling my router (still selling at good price compared to new stuff) and adding more money and getting a wifi6 one

The router you saw in the previous video for is selling for same price as Archer AX20 which can reach 800mbps! wow!

my local router shop

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1Dyaesve4M
(speed test)

I don't get how that 450N router is 50 JOD and the AX10 is 45 JOD. I'd get the AX10 for that price.
 
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Dasa

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2400mw in at the port does not mean 2400mw WiFi output.

Yeah, you're right! well my mobo is old but has USB 3 which I used it most of the time for the wifi USB adaptor in case it was better

so I should go for PCIe card, right?

That router is a very low end wifi6 router it will not perform much better than wifi5 (802.11ac). Don't believe vendor test they likely were sitting on top of the router and in a room with no interference. Most people do not get much more than 300mbps just like wifi5. If it was a top end wifi6 router it might get 600-700 sitting on top of the router. It is using what is called QAM1024 data encoding and you are lucky if that works 5-10ft from the router.

You can't look at the power coming from the usb. That is powering the whole device. When you look at it that way you could say a computer that has a 800 watt power supply would put out 800watts of wifi. It would actually fry you sitting next to the computer. 2.4ghz is exactly the same frequency a microwave oven uses and many are only 500 watts.

The only numbers that matter are the ones I linked for your device. These numbers are verified by the FCC following very strict rules on how you test.
Unless the device is illegal they can not put out more than 1watt of power. Things like alpha and amped like to pretend their device and put out more power but when you look up the FCC numbers they are under the 1watt limit. Its not like the unknown brands from china that do not have fcc certification. The only way to get those is to import them yourself since customs does not care to enforce fcc rules for 1 device but if you imported a few thousand they would block the shipment if there was not fcc certification.

I thought the higher QAM the better from what I saw in that data sheet? the numbers were getting bigger going towards QAM 1024... I guess I didn't understand the sheet.

I understand what you say, in the least I thought it can provide 2400 watts if the wifi adapter needed it, like any device it can consume low watts or high watts depending on settings and you need the port to be able to give enough power if needed.

I honestly never understood how they control the power output, I always thought by changing region you would do that, I mean every country has it's own rules, or do they make special batches for USA that is complying with US rules for example? or do they use driver to control the output and block it in settings, I always searched this topic without much results. I just remembered that looong time ago I tried changing Tx power using Linux commands but it didn't work either (I think), for windows I don't think I managed to find a way.

According to Tplink site mine works at 20dbm in CE standard countries and 27dbm in FCC countries which is what it does in the tests (26 point something) but how much USB power is need to output that? is there a formula for that? my guess is 2400 mw is enough, it can't be less efficient than that. (2400 to 400)

I searched FCC site for Alpha networks products, they don't seem to have shipped anything new to USA.

Also found this FCC rules , it seems the more gain antenna has the less power is allowed to output? did I get that right?

So what router would you recommend from the list as minimum? what would you point me to look at?

Technically they aren't lying, just being deceptive and allowing the consumer to make assumptions based on their own ignorance of the technical details. On their website, it clearly states 450mbps wireless speed numerous times, but doesn't say anything about internet speeds or lan speeds. https://www.tp-link.com/au/home-networking/high-power-router/tl-wr941hp/

It is technically capable when doing file transfers to several computers from wifi to LAN.

OP needs to buy a better router for their internet plan.

The public is always ignorant, that is no excuse to take advantage of them, just like food labels, they always try to make it clear and simple, why not in tech products? it's like only IT pro buy routers, no mom and dad buy them too or should be able to do so.

Like selling a car that can reach 300 mile/hour with small print saying tires explode after 200 mile/hour lol this is totally a scam, I can't replace that port so how can I fix it? I can't.

I don't get how that 450N router is 50 JOD and the AX10 is 45 JOD. I'd get the AX10 for that price.

That's why I think I still have time to sell it, don't know why the price is high, maybe performed well?

After reading your reply I thought what about the TV built in wifi, it seems to be wifi5 but couldn't exceed 55mbps when the router is in front of it, weird!

I got my wifi adaptor out again and I am seeing the tplink router showing up and disappearing and having problem connecting to it on windows 10, no problem with nokia extender, this reminded me why I didn't sell it last year, I feared it is broken, seems to be working fine when connecting from win 7 but not very sure.
 

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Food labels clear and simple?

Well when it says 500g you get 500g not like Tplink they promise 450mbps and then you spend 1 week in forums trying to understand why you're not getting that :ROFLMAO:

I mean they are improving and need more work but they in technology they spend zero effort to explain what you get, I just checked the box, it says 450Mbps on 2.4Ghz , simple but useless. I buy a box with BIG font saying 450 means I want to see 450 on speed test, they didn't say 450 total to make you think what is total? or even up to 450, no simply 450, they need to say 450 then add wink face lol
 
I thought the higher QAM the better from what I saw in that data sheet? the numbers were getting bigger going towards QAM 1024... I guess I didn't understand the sheet.

I understand what you say, in the least I thought it can provide 2400 watts if the wifi adapter needed it, like any device it can consume low watts or high watts depending on settings and you need the port to be able to give enough power if needed.

I honestly never understood how they control the power output, I always thought by changing region you would do that, I mean every country has it's own rules, or do they make special batches for USA that is complying with US rules for example? or do they use driver to control the output and block it in settings, I always searched this topic without much results. I just remembered that looong time ago I tried changing Tx power using Linux commands but it didn't work either (I think), for windows I don't think I managed to find a way.

According to Tplink site mine works at 20dbm in CE standard countries and 27dbm in FCC countries which is what it does in the tests (26 point something) but how much USB power is need to output that? is there a formula for that? my guess is 2400 mw is enough, it can't be less efficient than that. (2400 to 400)

I searched FCC site for Alpha networks products, they don't seem to have shipped anything new to USA.

Also found this FCC rules , it seems the more gain antenna has the less power is allowed to output? did I get that right?

So what router would you recommend from the list as minimum? what would you point me to look at?
The problem is because the higher the QAM number the more data it attempts to pack into the radio signal. This means it is much more suceptaible to damage that prevents it from being decoded. People who have tested this pretty much say you have to be in the same room to use QAM1024, you might as well use a ethernet cable. High speed on something like a phone is almost silly to think about. The only thing you need higher speed for is large file downloads and most portable devices don't have much room to store it. The vast majority of function you do on a portable device is fairly low bandwidth so you don't need fancy stuff. You are in some way better off using a simpler data encoding that is more stable.

They actually do manufacture the radio chips for different regions. The FCC really cracked down on the chipset makers when every one was setting the country code to russia to use more power and unauthorized channels. This is why the wifi chipset are so locked down. It would be nice if it at least let you access things like error counts etc but pretty much you are limited to setting the radio channels and passwords and maybe on some reducing the transmit power...but not increasing above the legal limit.

The dbm to watts is a messy concept to understand. Every 3db multiplys the power by 2 and every 10 multiplies it by 10. 20dbm is 100mw and 30dbm is 1000mw. In any case the power required will be that 1 watt plug whatever overhead it takes to run the wifi chip which is actually a small cpu.

The fcc rules is what is called effective power. It includes the radio transmit power as well as the gain from antenna. What you commonly see is 250mw radio transmitter paired with 5.5db antenna. Since 6db would give you 250x4 they use 5.5 to be sure they stay under the 1watt limit.
This is how amp cheats. People put 9db or larger antenna on in place of the 6db. Amp pretend that because they did not ship it with the antenna actually attached that makes the device legal. In any case it only works to a point. The amplifiers in the radio chips are optimized to work with certain size antenna. The problem is it gets more signal but it also gets more noise. This noise problem is why they just don't make 1watt radios, it is much easier/cheaper to make a smaller amplifier.

With the thread this long I am unsure what list. What I generally recommend is buy wifi5 ie 802.11ac. Unless you have high end device you need nothing more than one with a 1200 number but 1450 or 1900 are about the same price so it doesn't matter a lot. Be sure to get gigabit lan/wan ports. If you have more money to spend I would go with wifi6e. Until fairly recently these were extremely expensive routers, asus has a really fancy one they sell for $750. TPlink though has started to sell archer axe75 with a list price of $200. The wifi nic cards wifi6 and wifi6e cost about the same price. Pretty much wifi6 is a dead option since the wifi6e routers will also function on the 5g radio band just like wifi6.
 
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The problem is because the higher the QAM number the more data it attempts to pack into the radio signal. This means it is much more suceptaible to damage that prevents it from being decoded. People who have tested this pretty much say you have to be in the same room to use QAM1024, you might as well use a ethernet cable. High speed on something like a phone is almost silly to think about. The only thing you need higher speed for is large file downloads and most portable devices don't have much room to store it. The vast majority of function you do on a portable device is fairly low bandwidth so you don't need fancy stuff. You are in some way better off using a simpler data encoding that is more stable.

They actually do manufacture the radio chips for different regions. The FCC really cracked down on the chipset makers when every one was setting the country code to russia to use more power and unauthorized channels. This is why the wifi chipset are so locked down. It would be nice if it at least let you access things like error counts etc but pretty much you are limited to setting the radio channels and passwords and maybe on some reducing the transmit power...but not increasing above the legal limit.

The dbm to watts is a messy concept to understand. Every 3db multiplys the power by 2 and every 10 multiplies it by 10. 20dbm is 100mw and 30dbm is 1000mw. In any case the power required will be that 1 watt plug whatever overhead it takes to run the wifi chip which is actually a small cpu.

The fcc rules is what is called effective power. It includes the radio transmit power as well as the gain from antenna. What you commonly see is 250mw radio transmitter paired with 5.5db antenna. Since 6db would give you 250x4 they use 5.5 to be sure they stay under the 1watt limit.
This is how amp cheats. People put 9db or larger antenna on in place of the 6db. Amp pretend that because they did not ship it with the antenna actually attached that makes the device legal. In any case it only works to a point. The amplifiers in the radio chips are optimized to work with certain size antenna. The problem is it gets more signal but it also gets more noise. This noise problem is why they just don't make 1watt radios, it is much easier/cheaper to make a smaller amplifier.

With the thread this long I am unsure what list. What I generally recommend is buy wifi5 ie 802.11ac. Unless you have high end device you need nothing more than one with a 1200 number but 1450 or 1900 are about the same price so it doesn't matter a lot. Be sure to get gigabit lan/wan ports. If you have more money to spend I would go with wifi6e. Until fairly recently these were extremely expensive routers, asus has a really fancy one they sell for $750. TPlink though has started to sell archer axe75 with a list price of $200. The wifi nic cards wifi6 and wifi6e cost about the same price. Pretty much wifi6 is a dead option since the wifi6e routers will also function on the 5g radio band just like wifi6.

That makes sense, that is why I used to hear that 5ghz goes less distance than 2.4ghz but faster....

I can set the region in my router, I am using Australia, I guess that will only change the numbers of channels but not power, I haven't seen faster results.

Thank you for the info on plug power and amplifiers!

I think the best idea is to try a router before buying it and see the results first, like USAFRet said many times, it deferrers from environment to another, this is likely not going to happen but I will keep this router for now after reading about the errors in high QAM numbers, since I have far devices and close ones, I can't risk it for the sake of close devices.

I was all day reading Tplink forums about a weird problem with many of their routers it appears, I am not sure anymore what makes it happen, need to solve it (at least know the settings that fix it) before selling my router, seems working perfectly right now and the settings are the same, but I wanted to say that Tplink quality of support and transparency is nill, if you don't have Amazon to accept your returns you have no chance.

Thank you
bill001g for all the time, help and info! 🙏

Also for USAFRet and gggplaya 🙏

That was very kind of you, haven't seen a forum as helpful as this one!