I have to start by admitting that I consider myself only semi-literate in networking issues.
Having said, that I recently decided to move from an Asus N66 (N900) router to the new Synology AC1900 router. A number of my devices at home now have ac enabled wifi chips so I thought this would make sense specially when the devices communicate with each other, or my Synology NAS.
However, I was disappointed to see that there was zero improvement. Here is the basic experiment that I ran:
On both routers I had set up separate 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wifi networks. In the case of Synology, I set the 5Ghz to communicate with only ac enabled devices.
I connected my 2014 Macbook Pro through 5ghz networks and downloaded a 881MB folder of flac files from my NAS (which is of course connected via ethernet to the router). For both routers this took about 56 seconds give or take. In fact, for Synology it took a few seconds more.
Are the benefits of an ac router tied to other scenarios, and not like the one above?
(Synology mentions something about ensuring that both USB ports be set to 2.0 to maximize speeds, so I did that as well. The Asus firmware is the latest that is available, and Synology's is the second latest. It does not seem that the latest does anything for wifi speeds and has something to do with stuff in China and Germany, if I recollect correctly).
Finally, I should conclude by noting that my cable broadband plan allows downloads at 100Mbps late in the night both routers showed speedtest results of 110Mbps on wifi. But i think Synology cannot be expected to ouperfom the Asus along these lines given the limitation on broadband speeds.
Having said, that I recently decided to move from an Asus N66 (N900) router to the new Synology AC1900 router. A number of my devices at home now have ac enabled wifi chips so I thought this would make sense specially when the devices communicate with each other, or my Synology NAS.
However, I was disappointed to see that there was zero improvement. Here is the basic experiment that I ran:
On both routers I had set up separate 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wifi networks. In the case of Synology, I set the 5Ghz to communicate with only ac enabled devices.
I connected my 2014 Macbook Pro through 5ghz networks and downloaded a 881MB folder of flac files from my NAS (which is of course connected via ethernet to the router). For both routers this took about 56 seconds give or take. In fact, for Synology it took a few seconds more.
Are the benefits of an ac router tied to other scenarios, and not like the one above?
(Synology mentions something about ensuring that both USB ports be set to 2.0 to maximize speeds, so I did that as well. The Asus firmware is the latest that is available, and Synology's is the second latest. It does not seem that the latest does anything for wifi speeds and has something to do with stuff in China and Germany, if I recollect correctly).
Finally, I should conclude by noting that my cable broadband plan allows downloads at 100Mbps late in the night both routers showed speedtest results of 110Mbps on wifi. But i think Synology cannot be expected to ouperfom the Asus along these lines given the limitation on broadband speeds.
