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Wi-Fi 6 Performance Roundup: Five Routers Tested

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The ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 is the only tri-band router tested, but its Wi-Fi design is essentially the same as the RT-AX88U's. I didn't have NETGEAR's tri-band AX12 Nighthawk RAX200 on hand, which has essentially the same design.

Surely if the above is true then the Asus GT-AX11000 has 512MB of flash, not 256MB as shown in the review? (The Netgear RAX200 has 1GB of RAM & 256MB of flash).
 
Nope it’s 256MB according to Asus. The RAX200 however should have 512 MB flash. If going by WiKidevi, sometimes people put in specs from pre production units that don’t reflect the final changes.

Scroll down to memory section:
https://www.asus.com/Networking/ROG-Rapture-GT-AX11000/specifications/

RAX80 has 1 GB RAM and 512 MB Flash, because I have checked the debug page on that one. That’s the only spec I saw that was incorrect, in the review.
 
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Can router manufacturer really change anything regarding the 5Ghz and OFDMA and MU-MIMO support or do they all have to wait for Broadcom to delivery new firmware that enables these features?
 
Can router manufacturer really change anything regarding the 5Ghz and OFDMA and MU-MIMO support or do they all have to wait for Broadcom to delivery new firmware that enables these features?

I believe we have to wait for Broadcom to enable those, then Asus gets it and will update their firmware. It sucks, but welcome to the world of high end beta testing.
 
Can router manufacturer really change anything regarding the 5Ghz and OFDMA and MU-MIMO support or do they all have to wait for Broadcom to delivery new firmware that enables these features?
Manufacturers have had SDKs from both Broadcom and Qualcomm for awhile now that support OFDMA and AX MU-MIMO.

The problem has been that performance improvements from OFDMA have not met expectations, so router vendors have been reluctant to release firmware that supports those features.
 
That data is in the article.

Sorry, I think I was in error in how I worded the question, basically the idea I was getting at, is suppose a scenario like this comes up, a user currently has a reasonably high end 802.11ac wireless router, and a pretty common set of 802.11ac devices, e.g., a smartphone with a 2 stream 802.11ac radio, and a laptop with an 802.11ac WiFi adapter. Now suppose that user upgraded to something like the Netgear RAX120, would there be any improvements along the lines of things like this https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wir...oes-an-ac-router-improve-n-device-performance.

Or are the days of such enhancements completely over?
 
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Well thank you never much for this write up!! I was just having the same itch to upgrade again from my old Asus RT-N66W. SNB has the best info that I am looking for.
 
The problem has been that performance improvements from OFDMA have not met expectations, so router vendors have been reluctant to release firmware that supports those features.

I'm honestly not surprised...

The ugly truth is that uplink OFDMA is a truly hard problem to solve, mainly because there is no improvement - OFDMA uplink was in WiMax (802.16) and a prime reason why LTE chose to do a different uplink method - SC-FDMA aka LP-OFDMA

For newer forum members - I was there as part of the IEEE 802.16e/16m working group - and there was more than a fair amount of discussion on uplink design, and for what it was, intel shut down all discussion about anything other than strict OFMDA.

As we all know - in the 4G battles - WiMax obviously didn't win the business. I'm reasonably certain that the 802.11ax folks will come to their senses and seek scheduler improvements on the WiFi TDD link using the classic 802.11 uplink
 
Well, that's interesting. I didn't see anything on the press wires. You'd have to be very foolish to pay $700 for it...
Oh interesting, I hope you get the chance to review the AX Velopwhich will give us a chance to compare it to the AX routers in the current test.
It is a pity they only seem to have 4 Gigabit ports, I rely on the EA9500 8 ports today but would like some additional range either by AX, Velop or both. I live in a very noisy area and AX with new bands would help me tremendously until my neighbours get AX. I have already upgraded 4 laptops with Intel AX200 cards.
 
The MAX speed is 2.4Gbps under (160MHz) AX, but wath is the MAX speed under AC standards for the Intel AX200 card ?
 
This is what the data sheet says:
2.4Gbps "Nearly 3X higher peak data rates" (2x2 802.11ax 160MHz) claims are based on the comparison of the expected max theoretical data rates for similarly configured 802.ax and standard 802.ac Wi-Fi solutions..." So I don't know if nearly 3X qualifies for the difference between 2.4 and 1.7 Gbps.. Anyhow "Nearly 3X" might not reflect the capabilities of AX200 unde ac standard..
 
So I don't know if nearly 3X qualifies for the difference between

2x2 802.11AC 80MHz -> 867Mbps x 3 = 2.6Gbps, ~ 3X
This is what they are thinking in the marketing department. Those guys have to sell, you know.
 

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