[SOLVED] Wifi speed on tplink router

[Donnyyy]

Hello, I recently bought a tplink ax20 1800 router, and i have fibers with 600 download Mb plan, I had the fiber company replace their router with an adapter so I can use my router instead, everything seems fine except that the speed of the 2.4 band is not going over 100Mb, but the router specs indicates that the 2.4 band will support up to 600 and the 5 band will support up to 1200, I'm wondering what could be the problem, the 5 band is ok and going to 600 or less if not close to the router. could there be some setting I shoud change. thx

 

[bill001g]

So you got conned by marketing guys selling wifi6.

First you must have end devices that can run wifi6 or your so called router is going to drop back to 802.11ac. This means your 1800 router is the same as ac1200.

The largest "scam" with wifi6 is that all devices do not support the key feature which makes wifi6 fast. This is the ability to run 160mhz wide channels. Because of all the complexity of avoiding weather radar most end device and a lot of routers only support 80mhz bands. This is the same as 802.11ac. Your router only supports 80mhz bands. The second feature that makes wifi6 faster is the use of QAM1024 encoding. This has a lot of issues with interference from other signals so only works well close to the router. It also currently does not work well with over 2x2 mimo.

Without these 2 key feature you pretty much have a slightly better 802.11ac except 802.11ac many times has more than 2 antenna to support higher mimo rates. So in many cases a cheaper 802.11ac device can outperform the low end wifi6 devices.

You will not likely ever get over 100mbps on 2.4g. They are limited to 40mhz radio bands maximum. If you were to buy the top end wifi6 units and had end devices that could also fully use wifi6 you might get 600mbps ob 5g if you were lucky. The largest problem for wifi is still all your neighbors stomping on the signals and wifi6 just makes this worse by trying to use even more bandwidth.

Maybe wifi6e will solve the bandwidth problem and there is not the weather radar issue on the 6g radio band.

 

[Donnyyy]

So you got conned by marketing guys selling wifi6.

First you must have end devices that can run wifi6 or your so called router is going to drop back to 802.11ac. This means your 1800 router is the same as ac1200.

The largest "scam" with wifi6 is that all devices do not support the key feature which makes wifi6 fast. This is the ability to run 160mhz wide channels. Because of all the complexity of avoiding weather radar most end device and a lot of routers only support 80mhz bands. This is the same as 802.11ac. Your router only supports 80mhz bands. The second feature that makes wifi6 faster is the use of QAM1024 encoding. This has a lot of issues with interference from other signals so only works well close to the router. It also currently does not work well with over 2x2 mimo.

Without these 2 key feature you pretty much have a slightly better 802.11ac except 802.11ac many times has more than 2 antenna to support higher mimo rates. So in many cases a cheaper 802.11ac device can outperform the low end wifi6 devices.

You will not likely ever get over 100mbps on 2.4g. They are limited to 40mhz radio bands maximum. If you were to buy the top end wifi6 units and had end devices that could also fully use wifi6 you might get 600mbps ob 5g if you were lucky. The largest problem for wifi is still all your neighbors stomping on the signals and wifi6 just makes this worse by trying to use even more bandwidth.

Maybe wifi6e will solve the bandwidth problem and there is not the weather radar issue on the 6g radio band.

hmm, was not aware of that.
So, there's nothing good about buying this router? I bought it indeed for future compatibality, I'll probably buy a smartphone and other devices in the future that will support wifi 6, also btw I'm getting now 600 on 5 band if I'm closer to the router and about 200-300 when I'm about 25-30 feet far, with an iphone 8.

 

[bill001g]

Wifi6 is fine as long as you know what you are buying and have a use for it today.

These devices were almost outdated the day they came to market. The FCC approved the use of the 6g radio band much faster than most people expected. All the electronic companies had too much invested in their wifi6 stuff so they kept very quiet about wifi6e. They really wanted people to buy wifi6 stuff and then upgrade again a year later to wifi6e.

Wifi6e stuff is now becoming much more common. Not a lot of end devices support it yet but that is likely to quickly change.

Like most people wifi you are being limited by your end device. Your current phone does not support wifi6 and is running 802.11ac. Even if you had purchased a fancy 802.11ac 4x4 mimo unit it still would not run faster since the phone only support 2x2. What is really surprising is you getting 600mbps. the 200-300 is the much more common connection speed. The maximum raw data encoding rate the device supports is 833 and most times you do not even get 1/2 that. I assume you are using speed test to see this and not looking at the connection rate. If you had a wifi6 device then I could see the 600 number very close where you could get qam1024 to work. The raw encoding rate for wifi6 at 80mhz is 1200 with qam1024.

 

[Donnyyy]

Wifi6 is fine as long as you know what you are buying and have a use for it today.

These devices were almost outdated the day they came to market. The FCC approved the use of the 6g radio band much faster than most people expected. All the electronic companies had too much invested in their wifi6 stuff so they kept very quiet about wifi6e. They really wanted people to buy wifi6 stuff and then upgrade again a year later to wifi6e.

Wifi6e stuff is now becoming much more common. Not a lot of end devices support it yet but that is likely to quickly change.

Like most people wifi you are being limited by your end device. Your current phone does not support wifi6 and is running 802.11ac. Even if you had purchased a fancy 802.11ac 4x4 mimo unit it still would not run faster since the phone only support 2x2. What is really surprising is you getting 600mbps. the 200-300 is the much more common connection speed. The maximum raw data encoding rate the device supports is 833 and most times you do not even get 1/2 that. I assume you are using speed test to see this and not looking at the connection rate. If you had a wifi6 device then I could see the 600 number very close where you could get qam1024 to work. The raw encoding rate for wifi6 at 80mhz is 1200 with qam1024.

On the 5 band iphone 8

~30 feet (2 walls apart):

~20 feet (2-1 walls apart):

~10 feet (1 walls apart):

The 3rd one is similar to what I'm getting with ethernet on my pc with only the speed a little faster and the ping at 2

(btw I don't understand some of the terms you're using)

 

[bill001g]

Don't tell anyone or it might break itself

Your numbers are much higher than most people get.

 

[Donnyyy]

But what about your comments, should I consider returning it, you got me a little confused, I have a lot of wifi usage and not just me, 5 smartphones, laptops, and more, none of them is wifi 6 yet, and a lot of wired devices also, but probably as time will pass more and more devices will support wifi 6, and this is the reason I bought it, for future proofing, was it a mistake? if you can please recap, and still didnt understand why is the 2.4 band doesnt pass 100 no matter how far from the router

 

[bill001g]

For whatever reason you are getting better results than many other people report. You numbers are so high they are close to the artificial lab testing conditions.

You also are getting this without using the wifi6 features since your phone is only wifi5 (ie 802.1ac).

I have no explanation for this other than you live someplace with very little interference and your house does not block a lot of the signals.

It is hard question about future proof since part of this is money. If you had a 802.11ac router I would say maybe consider wifi6e. Wifi6 equipment is not "future proof". Your case is even harder with the mess involving returning equipment.

You are getting such high numbers I would consider yourself lucky and stay with what you have. If you were to wait until you had a number of wifi6e devices and then replace this router that would probably be your best option. By that time wifi6e routers should have come down in price, they are still very expensive. Also they will have patched any bugs related to running on the 6g radio bands that they will not know about until more people have end devices that can use it.

The reason the speed on 2.4g is limited is related to the radio bandwidth. The widest channel you can use on 2.4g is 40mhz. On 5g they uses 80mhz and with wifi6 160mhz. This more than anything else is what increases the speed. It is like saying you are going to pack something into a box. The larger the box the more you can put in. Now you might try to also increase the amount by changing the packing materials and how you arrange the stuff but this has much less increase than making the box larger. This is like saying the box is the channel width and the rearranging is the data encoding. You can use fancier data encoding methods but because they are more easily damage by interference and distance from the router they are much less effective at increasing the rates.

 

[Donnyyy]

For whatever reason you are getting better results than many other people report. You numbers are so high they are close to the artificial lab testing conditions.

You also are getting this without using the wifi6 features since your phone is only wifi5 (ie 802.1ac).

I have no explanation for this other than you live someplace with very little interference and your house does not block a lot of the signals.

It is hard question about future proof since part of this is money. If you had a 802.11ac router I would say maybe consider wifi6e. Wifi6 equipment is not "future proof". Your case is even harder with the mess involving returning equipment.

You are getting such high numbers I would consider yourself lucky and stay with what you have. If you were to wait until you had a number of wifi6e devices and then replace this router that would probably be your best option. By that time wifi6e routers should have come down in price, they are still very expensive. Also they will have patched any bugs related to running on the 6g radio bands that they will not know about until more people have end devices that can use it.

The reason the speed on 2.4g is limited is related to the radio bandwidth. The widest channel you can use on 2.4g is 40mhz. On 5g they uses 80mhz and with wifi6 160mhz. This more than anything else is what increases the speed. It is like saying you are going to pack something into a box. The larger the box the more you can put in. Now you might try to also increase the amount by changing the packing materials and how you arrange the stuff but this has much less increase than making the box larger. This is like saying the box is the channel width and the rearranging is the data encoding. You can use fancier data encoding methods but because they are more easily damage by interference and distance from the router they are much less effective at increasing the rates.

First of all thank you for all the responses.

This is actually the 1st time I'm hearing on wifi 6e, never heard of it before, which is probably because of markerting as you say.

some more info:
The router of the siber comany which I had before also had similar results but a bit slower, the reason I replaced it was because of recommendations I heard and the fact that it didn't support wifi 6 and it was more expensive: it was ~250$ to buy or ~8$ per month to rent, and I did the rent option konwing I will replace it as I did in a couple of months, the tplink router was ~141$, so I figured no brainer.

So why in the spec of this router they say band 2.4 -> 600Mhz / band 5 -> 1200Mhz, are they lying? what do I need to be able to get that speed on the 2.4, is it newer device like iphone 13 for example that supports wifi 6, still didn't understand that part fully.
https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/wifi-router/archer-ax20/#specifications

 

[bill001g]

Those are not speeds those represent data encoding rate...MCS values to be more accurate.

So first wifi is half duplex they are adding transmit speed and receive speed together. This is like calling a ethernet cable 2gbit but ethernet can actually transmit 1g and receive 1g at the same exact time where wifi only 1 device can talk at a time so you in general will not even get 1/2 that rate on wifi.
Next the base rate is 286.8 assuming the best possible condition on 2.4g but they are rounding this up to 300mbps.
Then they are using 2x2 mimo. This send 2 overlapping signals that intentionally interfere with each other. The end device then tries to dig the 2 signals out. You will never get even close to double but the manufacture pretend you will and double the 300 number to get 600.

So they are being extremely deceptive....but this is nothing new. I mean they call the router 1800 by adding the 2.4g and 5g speeds together even though no single end device can actually use both radio at the same time.

The largest issue is nobody lives in some lab. The largest problem is all the neighbors using wifi stomping on the data signals. None of this fancy stuff works well when there is so much data being damaged. This is the key reason wifi6e is going to be better. It is not actually any different than wifi6 it uses exactly the same data encoding methods. The only difference is it runs on the 6g radio band in addition to 2.4 and 5. There is a massive amount of new bandwidth. If I read it correctly at least 5 different people can run 160mhz radio channels and not interfere with each other. So for a while everyone can pick a channel for themselves. I am sure some company will start selling a box that has 10 6g radio chips in it so one user can use all the bandwidth again. Years ago wifi actually worked pretty well with very weak signals but now it is so over crowded and you have people making it even worse by putting in repeaters/extenders trying to solve the interference but actually making it worse.