AC1900 First Look: NETGEAR R7000 & ASUS RT-AC68U

[PrivateJoker]

Have you considered rerunning the tests with the transmission power set at 200mW on the RT-AC68U in order to ascertain whether or not it makes any difference to the results of the various tests ?

You can use something like LAN Speed Test free or Helios on OSX, along with the connection stats your NIC provides you and record tests at your own premise to compare different transmission power settings. You'd obviously want to check both wifi bands, ideally with a couple different clients. Each setting, other misc RF in the air, and the building materials really have a dramatic impact.

Best practice is usually to start at whatever high end of the range you're considering, make all your measurements, then back down 10mw and repeat. Keep repeating until there is a significant, repeatable drop in signal strength and txfr speed. Any higher than that # not only doesn't help, it can make the overall environment a "noisier" one and hurt txfr speeds. Mitigating noise is as important to a radio wave as transmission power.

It has been said a million times in this forum, but with the 2-way nature of wifi, it doesn't do you any favors to have one side of the transmission be boosted way over the other side. Your clients tend to be in the 25-60mw last time I looked up the specs on any of my clients.

Just as doubling the power in watts of an amplified audio signal doesn't double the loudness coming out of a speaker, doubling the RF power of a signal does not double the gain, distance, or throughput of a radio wave. Doubling the horsepower in a car, boat, or plane doesn't halve it's acceleration times to 60 feet nor double it's top speed.

 

[thiggins]

Have you considered rerunning the tests with the transmission power set at 200mW on the RT-AC68U in order to ascertain whether or not it makes any difference to the results of the various tests ?

No. That is not a good use of my time.
In this article http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wire...228-an-experiment-in-wireless-power-and-range I had a hard time finding a router whose transmit power adjust actually worked, including the RT-AC66U.

 

[BatJoe]

Have you considered rerunning the tests with the transmission power set at 200mW on the RT-AC68U in order to ascertain whether or not it makes any difference to the results of the various tests ?

Doing that would most likely diminish throughput.

 

[Poseidon]

thiggins, did you say that you're going to be reviewing the Linksys EA6900 soon?

I have yet to find anyone review this router and it's been out for almost 3 weeks now. It seems like people are ignoring the EA6900 and mainly focusing on the Netgear R7000 and the Asus RT-AC68U.

 

[PrivateJoker]

thiggins, did you say that you're going to be reviewing the Linksys EA6900 soon?

I have yet to find anyone review this router and it's been out for almost 3 weeks now. It seems like people are ignoring the EA6900 and mainly focusing on the Netgear R7000 and the Asus RT-AC68U.

From review on 10/7/2013

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wire...1900-first-look-netgear-r7000-a-asus-rt-ac68u

The other question on your mind is likely to be "where's the Linksys EA6900"? Well, it seems that Linksys has a copy of the Octoscope MPE-based test setup I use and didn't like the results they were seeing when they checked the first batch of routers before sending them out for review. So they missed the window to be included in this review.

& from 10/17/2013

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/forums/showpost.php?p=86693&postcount=111

 

[Poseidon]

Thanks PJ. I was aware of this info but I thought I read somewhere that thiggins is testing the EA6900 and would have a review out shortly.

I apologize if I am wrong.

 

[thiggins]

EA6900 Review posted

Linksys EA6900 Wireless AC Router SMART Wi-Fi Dual Band AC1900 Reviewed

Please post in this new thread.

 

[DigitAl56K]

To the guy with the MAC/Surfboard issues, I've notices Surfboards don't like the MAC changing while powered on. If you connect a different piece of equipment to its Ethernet port you generally have to powercycle it.

 

[DigitAl56K]

Regarding VPN running on multiple cores, OpenVPN apparently doesn't support multithreading, so it's unlikely to happen. I agree a radio power option would be nice on the R7000.

 

[GypsyDRB]

To the guy with the MAC/Surfboard issues, I've notices Surfboards don't like the MAC changing while powered on. If you connect a different piece of equipment to its Ethernet port you generally have to powercycle it.

Thanks, will test this when I get time. Ultimately, I think my drops were related to the 2 TB drive I had connected to the 3.0 USB port. I thought I got some stability after resetting the router with thee latest firmware but I still had a lot of wired / wireless drops. I moved the 2 TB drive off readyshare and back to my desk top. iTunes became less of a PITA and the drops went away too.

 

[ehume]

It has been said a million times in this forum, but with the 2-way nature of wifi, it doesn't do you any favors to have one side of the transmission be boosted way over the other side. Your clients tend to be in the 25-60mw last time I looked up the specs on any of my clients.

Just as doubling the power in watts of an amplified audio signal doesn't double the loudness coming out of a speaker, doubling the RF power of a signal does not double the gain, distance, or throughput of a radio wave. Doubling the horsepower in a car, boat, or plane doesn't halve it's acceleration times to 60 feet nor double it's top speed.

This helps. Certainly when I jacked up the power of the RT-AC8U I had, the problems I had with 11n clients did not change. Even with the new BIOS that came out October 29, where we had connectivity before, we now had none or intermittent, depending on the location. It didn't matter that the router was putting out 200mW.

But somewhere I read that some routers transmit at 400mW. True? How can I find out? The RT-AC8U maxes out at 200mW.

How ironic, though, that the PCE-AC68 wireless adapter I got to go with the RT-AC68U router worked well, and in the basement at that. That is probably because of the 1-meter extension of the antennas, to get it out of a radio shadow.

Sent the RT-AC68U back, reinstalled the 2009 WNDR 3700. All the connectivity is restored.

So, if I get the R7000 and use it with the PCE-AC68, what should I expect? The review said that with two routers bridged (I am a nooby here, so I didn't really understand what was going on) the PCE-AC68 didn't seem to achieve AC-1900 speeds. But when I was using the RT-AC68U, the basement speeds were fast -- something like 300-450 Mbps. With the WNDR 3700, they are 100-162 Mbps. The whole point of getting a new router was getting that basement speed up (I suppose I shouldn't complain; until I had those antennas on the cables with the PCE-AC68 I was getting 6-8 Mbps).

But after the BIOS's are updated sufficiently, should I be able to use an R7000 with my PCE-AC68?

 

[RogerSC]

The routers that I've had have transmitted around 80-100mw by default. Those that allowed adjustment, raising the power really didn't help anything, for several reasons. One is that raising the power transmitted by the router doesn't increase the ability of the router to receive the signals back from the client, as you've discovered. Another is that doubling the power will give you only a theoretical 3dBm improvement. In fact, it may introduce distortion or other problems into the router's transmissions.

I'm currently using an R7000, and it's wireless covers my house, both on 2.4 and 5GHz. bands. However, if I didn't have a strong enough signal in some areas of my house, I'd add an access point (AP) in the area(s) with weak signals, since that actually solves wireless coverage problems. An access point router doesn't have to be a great router, since it basically just supplying some wireless (and maybe wired connections as well), not doing any routing. Most of the work is done by your main router. On the other hand, if you need a wireless-ac AP, that would be a more expensive router. But you may not need an AP, depending on what you find when you try things out.

 

[MaxGrit]

Does beam forming work with aftermarket high gain antennas?

 

[crazyea]

The default. When testing I change only the SSID, Channels and bandwidth settings as stated in the review.

I can change the SSD and the channel, but please tell me how to set the r7000 to use 20mhz.

 

[thiggins]

Does beam forming work with aftermarket high gain antennas?

Yes, but they should be omnidirectional.

Note that beamforming provides moderate throughput improvement only with medium signal strength and requires the client to support it to get this improvement.

 

[thiggins]

I can change the SSD and the channel, but please tell me how to set the r7000 to use 20mhz.

In the wireless setup change the Mode to Up to 289 Mbps for the 2.4 GHz radio.

 

[balu000]

ADSL2 Modem for Nighthawk

Hi Tim,

Am a novice in networking looking to buy the NETGEAR R7000 or ASUS RT-AC68U-. Can these routers act as a ADSL2 modem? If not what would be the best ADSL2 modem for these routers

thanks,
Balakrishnan Ramamoorthy

 

[thiggins]

Am a novice in networking looking to buy the NETGEAR R7000 or ASUS RT-AC68U-. Can these routers act as a ADSL2 modem? If not what would be the best ADSL2 modem for these routers

Neither has a built-in modem.
I don't have any recommendations on modems. Check with your ISP for recommended / approved products.

 

[stevech]

Neither has a built-in modem.
I don't have any recommendations on modems. Check with your ISP for recommended / approved products.

I recommend getting a cable or DSL modem from the ISP so there's no ISP/customer finger-pointing later about using a customer-owned modem.

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
Our ISP(Shaw) won't even allow 3rd party modem. Only their,s. They have data base with device s/n so we can only hook up their modems.