Are my wireless performance results typical for my equipment?

[darknight]

Desktop with a Gigabit Intel NIC was on the LAN side and I was testing the wireless with a Gateway laptop. The maximum link rate on the laptop was 144 Mbps on 2 GHz and 300 MHz on GHz.

Router was set very close to default. Settings are as follows:

- QoS disabled
- WPA2-Personal/AES encryption
- 2.4 GHz: N Only, 20 MHz, bandwidth
- 5 GHz: auto channel, 20/40

I chose to specify a bandwidth for the 2.4 GHz network since I live in a residential area. I also care the most about these results and I wanted to ensure consistency. In hindsight, I probably should have specified a set bandwidth for the 5 GHz radio as well.

Here are the results as collected by NetStress in units of kilobytes per second. Locations are progressively further away. For location 1 and 2, I would really just use an ethernet cable, 3 is a room away, 4 is a floor away, and 5 is in the basement. The house itself is not very large and it's fairly new, so walls are flimsy drywall.

Since I'm not an expert in network traffic I kept all NetStress settings to default: 1 TCP data stream composed of 64512 bytes and a maximum transmission unit of 1500 bytes. Standard deviations have been omitted for clarity. Obviously there was significant interference on Channel 11, and 6 fared much better.

As I said, I'm most interested in the 2.4 GHz frequency since not all of my devices support 5 GHz. So finally, my question: is the 16-24 Mbps range obtained in locations 3 (within 30 feet, separated by wall) and 4 (one room down, separated by floor) typical for my laptop's 144 Mbps link rate?

Thanks in advance.

 

[aaronwt]

That's pretty bad if that is typical from the N66U. My RT-N56U gets faster throughput than that with a linkrate that low. With the signal going through a firewall made of brick and cinderblock around 30 feet away. I can typically get speeds around half of what the link rate is.

 

[darknight]

That's pretty bad if that is typical from the N66U. My RT-N56U gets faster throughput than that with a linkrate that low. With the signal going through a firewall made of brick and cinderblock around 30 feet away. I can typically get speeds around half of what the link rate is.

I'm going to assume it's not typical for the N66. I may pick up a N56 just to test and swap out my N66 if the results are different. I was hoping someone would poke holes through my methodology more than anything.

 

[kbp]

I'm going to assume it's not typical for the N66. I may pick up a N56 just to test and swap out my N66 if the results are different. I was hoping someone would poke holes through my methodology more than anything.

Try setting the 2.4 to
control channel - 6
extension channel - upper
bandwidth - 40MHz.

 

[norazi]

im also getting mediocre wireless performance with my N66U... in the range of 30-50mbps (not as bad as yours but much worse than my old $40 router: linksys e3000).. i wish there was a for sure way to see if my hardware is faulty (maybe one of the antennas is broken)

 

[Clammydog]

Try setting the 2.4 to
control channel - 6
extension channel - upper
bandwidth - 40MHz.

Thanks for the info. I have a ASUS USB-N13 installed on one of my computers and the best connection I could get was 144mbps. Once I made the above changes to my N66-U I'm now getting 300mbps.

Regards,
c-dog