AC68U mesh net and 500 Mbps fiber

[grr]

Hi,

I have a 3700 sq ft three story house, a double external garage and a 500/500 Mbps fiber. 1st floor of the house is concrete. I have a technical room almost centered in the first floor. I have the Zyxel router from the ISP there, as well as my AC68U configured with aimesh and two aimesh nodes.

Meant to cover the house:
AC68U in tech room: 25-30 clients, typically 8-12 wifi
AC66U B1 in 3rd floor: 6-7 clients, typically 2-3 wifi

Meant to cover the garage and outdoors area, cars, ev charge box etc.
AC68U in garage: 3-5 clients, typically 2 wifi

The wifi clients are a mix of 2.4 and 5 Ghz. We are five people with iPhones and computers, and then most of the rest is TVs, TV boxes, power meter, PV inverter, ev charge box, cars, smart home devices (basically the gateway, the rest is on z-wave), Nest protects (smoke alarms), Sonos (some wired some wifi through wired Sonos boost) etc.

I have turned off Aiprotection, QoS and enabled NAT accelleration.

When I am sitting in my kitchen on the 2nd floor, with my Macbook Pro (2018 or something), I am able to get basically 480-500 Mbps both up and down from speedtest.net when I connect to the Zyxel from my ISP, but if I connect to the 5 Ghz on my Asus network, I am only able to get around 350-380 ish Mbps in both directions (usually better upload than download). The same applies to my iPhone 11. I dont think I have any devices supporting Wifi 6 at the moment. It has to be said that the Zyxel only has that one client when I am testing + the wired connection to my Asus routers, but I am very surpised that a cheap ISP router without visible antennas perform better than the Asus routers, even when I am on another floor, and would expect the mesh net to outperform by some margin. Latency to the closest speedtest server is the same on both routers, 2-3 ms. As of now it almost looks like the single Zyxel routers both performs better speedwise, and range, than the aimesh network of three routers. Is this caused by the clients or is it time to get rid of the 66 and 68s? Will I get the same problem with the Zyxel if I move all clients over to that? Any recommendation on solution? Asus or not.

 

[wouterv]

Theoretically the ISP speed gets distributed over all the clients in your home.
Only if you connect one client to the main router, that client should get the full ISP speed.
Also wireless can limit the speed, depending of the distance / disturbance and the number of parallel data streams.
For 802.11ac to get close to 500 Mbps you need at least a 2x2 connection (two data streams), but preferable a 3x3 (three data streams). Many clients are 1x1, some are 2x2 and very few are 3x3.
The range of 5 GHz is practically limited to one room or one floor (depending on the walls and floors as e.g. brick, concrete or wood), any further will limit the throughput.

 

[grr]

And I do understand that part of it, but even when there is basically no traffic from other clients, I get say 350 Mbps on the Asus 5 Ghz, change over to the wifi on the ISP supplied Zyxel router, and I get basically 500 Mbps immediately. Same client, routers are located right beside eachother. And to make it worse I should have even better coverage/bandwidth on the Asus mesh net, as there are three routers on aimesh and they are all connected through wired gigabit connection.

 

[Tech9]

Theoretically the ISP speed gets distributed over all the clients in your home.

Active clients, not clients in general. You may have 30 clients connected and one of them still getting full speed.

I get say 350 Mbps on the Asus 5 Ghz, change over to the wifi on the ISP supplied Zyxel router, and I get basically 500 Mbps immediately.

No wonder if your Zyxel router has much better AC Wave 2 radios. AC68U is a 2013 model router. AC66U B1 is a 2016 remake.