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AX88U 5Ghz wifi speed

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Thermaltake

Regular Contributor
Hi, I Have AX88U with connection of 1Gbps/500Mbps. I am doing speedtest over my phone(P20 Huawei) connected to 5Ghz network, and all I'm getting is 300/200 or something like that. Is there any chance of doing some tweak or something so that speed via phone is faster or there is non ?
 
Hi, first of all you'd have to determine where is the bottleneck -if any-, because you are getting some respectable throughput for being over wifi. Try the in-router speedtest (or with a PC ethernet connected) to be able to discard remote server or WAN related congestions. Then look in the router admin GUI network map what is your wifi connection speed, how many mb/sec ? if too low (under lets say 866mbps) would make your transfer speeds get capped under 400-500 mbps once discounted the medium overhead.
Now if you get a good connection speed, your media could also be congested with interference or other wifi networks at the same channel... You can determine that with the router's wifi radar.
And for last the parameters you have configured for wifi... if you have them setup by default and all the other commented factors have been checked you should get already good numbers... but there are some things that could be changed to avoid potential compatibility problems that can also hinder performance, like disabling universal beanforming, also disabling MU-MIMO and/or airtime fairness. Also make sure you do your tests quite near the router *if* you expect to see high rates.
Other obvious things to check on your own router is the concurrent usage by other users, the CPU usage, router/antenna positioning/distance and the log just in case you are facing some strange router behavior problem (which seems not logical since you are already at good performance levels)
For last, there are other factors in the router that can make you not reach high speeds like using Aiprotection or QoS and/or any function that disables the router hardware acceleration.

As you can see the answer to your question is quite complex and not just a magic setting to tuneup.
 
Try going to speedtest.net from a browser on your phone instead of the app and see what speed you get. I have an RT-AX86U and am unable to get over 300Mbps in the Speed Test app. I have 1G / 1G
 
I have a 500/500 connection and, generally speaking, I can't get better than 500/200 on a Zen WiFi XT8 - makes me think it's a firmware issue
 
Hi, first of all you'd have to determine where is the bottleneck -if any-, because you are getting some respectable throughput for being over wifi. Try the in-router speedtest (or with a PC ethernet connected) to be able to discard remote server or WAN related congestions. Then look in the router admin GUI network map what is your wifi connection speed, how many mb/sec ? if too low (under lets say 866mbps) would make your transfer speeds get capped under 400-500 mbps once discounted the medium overhead.
Now if you get a good connection speed, your media could also be congested with interference or other wifi networks at the same channel... You can determine that with the router's wifi radar.
And for last the parameters you have configured for wifi... if you have them setup by default and all the other commented factors have been checked you should get already good numbers... but there are some things that could be changed to avoid potential compatibility problems that can also hinder performance, like disabling universal beanforming, also disabling MU-MIMO and/or airtime fairness. Also make sure you do your tests quite near the router *if* you expect to see high rates.
Other obvious things to check on your own router is the concurrent usage by other users, the CPU usage, router/antenna positioning/distance and the log just in case you are facing some strange router behavior problem (which seems not logical since you are already at good performance levels)
For last, there are other factors in the router that can make you not reach high speeds like using Aiprotection or QoS and/or any function that disables the router hardware acceleration.

As you can see the answer to your question is quite complex and not just a magic setting to tuneup.

On PC I get stable all the time 937/500Mbps, but on phone I cant get over 300Mbps down or up via 5Ghz range is close to the router. On 5Ghz I am using chan. 36 and bandwidth 80Mhz, I scanned with my phone and there are not interference. Router cpu is on 0-10% random on each core, and memory on 46% so router is not sweating at all on this usage. Maybe some options in wireless - professional settings ?
 
What link rate is the P20 showing for that network? 300/200 sounds reasonable for a 1x1 client with a 433Mbps link rate, but the P20 seems to be a 2x2 device so it should sync at 867.
 
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What link rate is the P20 showing for that network? 300/200 sounds reasonable for a 1x1 client with a 433Mbps link rate, but the P20 seems to be a 2x2 device so it should sync at 867.

Exactly. What is your link rate ? (see network map 'view list')
 
On an iPhone 7 Plus I am getting 593/407 from an iPerf app to a cygwin iperf3 server on an Ethernet connected laptop.
It is connecting 2x2 866/866 on DFS Channel 52, 80 MHz wide. There is no detectable use of any of the DFS channels in my area. RSSI is -36 dB. Huawei P20 is listed as capable of 2x2 802.11ac.
 
On an iPhone 7 Plus I am getting 593/407 from an iPerf app to a cygwin iperf3 server on an Ethernet connected laptop.
It is connecting 2x2 866/866 on DFS Channel 52, 80 MHz wide. There is no detectable use of any of the DFS channels in my area. RSSI is -36 dB. Huawei P20 is listed as capable of 2x2 802.11ac.
So if the P20 has a link connection of 866mbps then definetly you should get more than 300mbps of real throughput in absence of other interferences or traffic. Did you disable the airtime fairness, MIMO and universal beanforming as suggested (wifi professional settings) ?
 
Yes I did on 5Ghz network airtime fairness, MIMO and universal beanforming (even tried disabling ax/ac beanforming) are disable. And I measure 263/174Mbps.

P.S
I don't know how others with AX88U have experience but from time to time my AX88U got some kernel stuff in log, and yesterday I lost connecting on it. I shut it off this morning and turn back On again and everything is Ok, but a lot of kernel stuff showing in system log busybox stuff, it's like it had some kind of craziness :D
 
Last edited:
Yes I did on 5Ghz network airtime fairness, MIMO and universal beanforming (even tried disabling ax/ac beanforming) are disable. And I measure 263/174Mbps.

P.S
I don't know how others with AX88U have experience but from time to time my AX88U got some kernel stuff in log, and yesterday I lost connecting on it. I shut it off this morning and turn back On again and everything is Ok, but a lot of kernel stuff showing in system log busybox stuff, it's like it had some kind of craziness :D

OK Then I am affraid you have nothing else to do to improve performance at the router level. To recap, you get lower speeds from one device (P20) than with another in the same conditions (is this true?) and in both cases with proper link rates... so everything is really pointing to the P20, being all other factors equal. By the way, if you are using the last Merlin beta or stock firmware, I'd recommend also to disable AX mode -the latest ASUS SDK seems like being a little wonky with AX mode-, although this is most likely unrelated to your speed problem.

Regarding the kernel stuff you see in the log, I do see some strangeness when applying wifi settings, but it seems like working properly elsewhere.
 
OK Then I am affraid you have nothing else to do to improve performance at the router level. To recap, you get lower speeds from one device (P20) than with another in the same conditions (is this true?) and in both cases with proper link rates... so everything is really pointing to the P20, being all other factors equal. By the way, if you are using the last Merlin beta or stock firmware, I'd recommend also to disable AX mode -the latest ASUS SDK seems like being a little wonky with AX mode-, although this is most likely unrelated to your speed problem.

Regarding the kernel stuff you see in the log, I do see some strangeness when applying wifi settings, but it seems like working properly elsewhere.
I tried on S9+ Samsung and it got 440/350. I got latest stock firmware not merlins.
 
By the way, I have the following settings on 5 GHz
  • 802.11ax / Wi-Fi 6 mode enabled
  • Wi-Fi Agile Multiband enabled
  • Target Wake Time enabled
  • Modulation Scheme Up to MCS 11 (NitroQAM/1024-QAM)
  • Airtime Fairness disabled
  • Multi-User MIMO enabled
  • OFDMA/802.11ax MU-MIMO DL/UL OFDMA + MU-MIMO
  • 802.11ax/ac Beamforming enabled
  • Universal Beamforming disabled
Retested and got 588/422
 
Only thing I didn't have same as you was OFDMA/802.11ax MU-MIMO DL/UL OFDMA + MU-MIMO mine was DL OFDMA Only, I switch it on OFDMA/802.11ax MU-MIMO DL/UL OFDMA + MU-MIMO but same resaults 375/191.

On what phone is you speed tested ?
 
I tested today on my new phone S21 Ultra, and I got 543/457. But still how come phones can't go all the way to 900Mbps like on PC.
 
Most likely all those tiny antennas can't mantain the higher modulation and coding schemes active. On PCs you get better antennas and sometimes 3x3 setups instead of the usual 1x1 or 2x2 used in phones.
On one of my APs that is running OpenWRT I can see how my phone regularly drops from MCS9 (433Mbps per stream on 80 Mhz AC) all they way to MCS5 (260Mbps).
 
I didn't know that smartphones can't reach more on normal 5Ghz wifi, you had to have wifi6 to get over 350Mbps. Even with wifi6 I never passed over 720Mbps and i got 1Gbps speed.
 

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