Avoiding 2.4GHz crowds, and VPN. 5GHz N or AC?

[philpoe]

Hi All,
After recently going through (yet another) bad experience with Comcast support at a rental property I help with the networking at, I reviewed the networks being broadcast, and saw that the 2.4GHz spectrum is now very crowded, and the 5GHz spectrum is not. 25Mbps Comcast service runs over MOCA networking to a pair of Tenda W268R N150 routers, and to an Actiontec 500Mbps powerline repeater.
The N150 routers get nearly cable speed over wifi when I configured them at home (with very little 2.4GHz competition). At the property, they only get 10-15Mbps over wifi, but cable speed when I connect directly to the router. The powerline repeater gets cable speed over wifi, and also when I connect directly to the repeater unit (I'm guessing that there's much less competition in 2.4GHz near the powerline device). MOCA and Powerline equipment doesn't seem to have any performance penalty at these speeds.

My goal was to replace the N150 routers with AC routers, and also to look at 3rd party firmware, and to set up a VPN to my house so that I could log into the rental property network and change settings if needed, without driving to the property.
I was pretty much settled on TP-Link Archer C5 V1.2/C7 V2 routers running Gargoyle, but was informed that these routers do not support beamforming, which I thought was crucial to performance of the 5GHz radios and clients (most, if not all the wifi clients are AC capable phones and laptops).

My question is - Without beamforming, is the expense of an AC router worth it compared to a 5GHz N router?
I can get 3 used simultaneous dual-band N600 routers for the price of a single recommended AC router. With the wiring already in place, I could put the N600 routers such that no client would have more than maybe 30 feet to reach a repeater, with a single wooden floor, and/or one drywall wall blocking.

Is it worthwhile setting up the VPN? For the N devices, I'm looking at the Netgear WNDR3800 running Gargoyle/OpenVPN.

Any help appreciated.

 

[thiggins]

Beamforming is overrated in my experience. It can provide higher throughput with medium level signals. It does nothing to extend range.

Yes, AC routers are worth it vs. N. Better radios, more powerful processors and lots of low-level Wi-Fi tweaks will give you better performance.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wire...oes-an-ac-router-improve-n-device-performance

Don't expect high throughput from OpenVPN. You'll get a couple of Mbps at best due to the load that encryption puts on the processor.

 

[stevech]

Beamforming is overrated in my experience. It can provide higher throughput with medium level signals. It does nothing to extend range.

agree. IMO, beamforming isn't practical for consumer WiFi due to costs and packaging.

 

[azazel1024]

agree. IMO, beamforming isn't practical for consumer WiFi due to costs and packaging.

I would only say that the beamforming that is practical for a consumer router results in relatively limited results. It isn't worthless and it isn't impractical to fit it on consumer wifi gear, it is just what is practical to fit isn't going to result in big gains.

This site and a few others have tested it and the "big gains" seem to be in the medium signal strength ranges, but gains are typically lowish. Of course I am not going to complain about 5-10% gains in throughput for a portion of the range if there aren't really other compromises.

 

[stevech]

bad cost/benefit

 

[philpoe]

Thanks everyone for the feedback.
At this point, even if I'm not quite ready to go implement a VPN today, it appears that the benefits of AC-class routers will still show up in my use cases at home and at the rental properties.

The thread regarding best router choices for VPN will likely help me make my decision, balancing my wifi needs right now, vs CPU processing power and software maturity for speed/efficiency of the VPN firmware/software stack.
http://www.snbforums.com/threads/best-router-for-openvpn-under-130.27113/

If it matters to anyone, my progression of routers considered was/is:

Netgear WNDR3800/WNDR4300 or TP-LINK TL-WDR3600/WDR4300 - Cheap, easily available (especially used) N routers with 5GHz radios. These are certainly more capable than the N150 routers I have in place, and still low cost. Probably the best value N routers to run Gargoyle/OpenWRT.

TP-Link Archer C5 v1.2/C7 V2 - Relatively inexpensive AC routers with more capability, well-regarded, that run Gargoyle. It turns out that they do not support beamforming. Probably the most capable routers that run Gargoyle/OpenWRT.

Tenda W1800R - Roughly the same hardware as an Asus RT-AC66U, but less expensive than other AC routers considered, and runs Tomato. At least the 5GHz radio supports beamforming. Probably the best value AC router that runs Tomato.

Asus RT-AC68U or Netgear R7000 or TP-Link Archer C9 - VPN apparently depends heavily on CPU core speed. These are all dual-core Broadcom 800MHz - 1GHz CPUs with the same radios. I'm currently planning to select from this list based on cost and available firmware, and bite the bullet on cost. The R7000 is the early front-runner as it supports Tomato and DD-WRT and can be found for a little less. Asus probably next.