Load Balance / Dual Wan router advice

[wsarahan]

Hi guys how are you?

I`m from Brazil and i`m going to USA tomorrow

I have today the RT-AC87U

Is there any better load balance router/ dual wan router that i can buy? The 5Ghz do not reach all my house with this one, but it`s a nice router

Any advice will be great

Thanks

 

[stevech]

I use/like Cradlepoint.
They have dual WAN and WiFi as WAN, with fail-over, fail-back and load balancing.

 

[System Error Message]

mikrotik routerOS does multiple WAN, load balancing and such quite well. Has a much better firewall too but is only for the skilled. asus dual wan doesnt work that well yet but there are a lot of other routers you can use.

If you dont have the skill than something proprietary like zyxel or even pfsense.

 

[Trip]

Hi - If you're planning on buying something while you're in the States, you'll find that brick-and-mortar stores (at least the big-box ones) won't stock most of the suggestions offered here. So you're probably going to have to order online.

Besides what's already been said (I'd echo Zyxel, or a pre-built pfsense appliance from Netgate, etc.), Peplink is also an option. They definitely get beat on price-to-performance but they target a bit of a different clientele, so perhaps worth adding to the list.

 

[wsarahan]

I need a used friendly router like de the 87U but with better 5ghz range and dual wan/load balance

If exist some router with better range at 5ghz will be great, but it's for a home network

Thanks

 

[System Error Message]

zyxel and pfsense are user friendly and dont require much skill, just a networked understanding of what you want to do.

 

[Trip]

It's somewhat difficult to find a consumer all-in-one which will do multi-wan and 5Ghz properly, much less either one on its own. I think you'd be better off splitting up the workload to a wired multi-wan router and dedicated 2.4/5Ghz access point. That type of setup will offer you better handling of each responsibility, rather than having to compromise on an overblown, overpriced all-in-one which does neither all that well... you might invest a bit more to set it all up, but the stability and performance gains will make it well worth it.

 

[Cloud200]

No you will not get any better range than the AC-87u.
It is pretty much on the legal edge of the limit for how much energy you can dump in the air from a wireless access point.

Instead, look for getting a second access point and wiring it to the router for adding coverage.

 

[System Error Message]

the ac87U is not on the edge of how much power you can transmit. Almost all consumer wifi transmits at 100mW while FCC allows 1W in 5 Ghz. Only some wifi routers can transmit at 1W such as ubiquiti and mikrotik routerboards.

The reason for this is that usually a single 100mW access point is sufficient to cover a house and they want to prevent overcrowding because crowding 1W wifi all over the place is going to be very very slow. On mikrotik's routerboard website you can read the FCC declaration for each particular access point as proof that they allow more power. One of their 5 Ghz wireless N access point transmits at 1600mW

 

[stevech]

the ac87U is not on the edge of how much power you can transmit. Almost all consumer wifi transmits at 100mW while FCC allows 1W in 5 Ghz. Only some wifi routers can transmit at 1W such as ubiquiti and mikrotik routerboards.

The reason for this is that usually a single 100mW access point is sufficient to cover a house and they want to prevent overcrowding because crowding 1W wifi all over the place is going to be very very slow. On mikrotik's routerboard website you can read the FCC declaration for each particular access point as proof that they allow more power. One of their 5 Ghz wireless N access point transmits at 1600mW

Don't forget that WiFi client devices are usually about 30mW. A high-powered AP/Router will, range-wise, out-talk the client. WiFi is two-way, not broadcast.
So when one says "will cover a whole house", that's referring to only one direction. The coverage for the inbound signals is much smaller or lower speed at the same places that the outbound signals occur.

 

[faur]

As far as I know, the Quantenna 1000 can tx on max 30dBi...that means a lot... anyway, you need to figure out how to set this value in the ac87u firmware...


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[stevech]

As far as I know, the Quantenna 1000 can tx on max 30dBi...that means a lot... anyway, you need to figure out how to set this value in the ac87u firmware...


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

? dBi is a measure of antenna gain. A 30dBi gain antenna is typically a dish.

 

[faur]

Yes, you're right, my bad... Quantenna 1000 PAs has 20dBm max on 5Ghz...


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[stevech]

That 20dBm is the usual standard for most 802.11 chips. That's 100mW. Typically available only at the low modulation orders, like 11b mode or lowest 11g/n modes - due to OFDM's higher speed needing 6dB or so of back-off in transmitter power to preserve transmitted waveform rho (distortion-free).

 

[azazel1024]

That 20dBm is the usual standard for most 802.11 chips. That's 100mW. Typically available only at the low modulation orders, like 11b mode or lowest 11g/n modes - due to OFDM's higher speed needing 6dB or so of back-off in transmitter power to preserve transmitted waveform rho (distortion-free).

Correct.

Also the lower power is in part so that you don't have the limits you do with an overpowered basestation (out talking the receiver), but also because supporting high transmit power without distortion takes more expensive components...and since there is little benefit in most applications...most don't do it.

For dedicated bridges you'll sometimes see transmitters that can do up to around 26dBm. But that is a special case because they are designed to link up with another bridge, also with a high power transmitter.

With TCP/IP and general 802.11 (most/all?) you have to have uniform modulation rates (for the later, can't be different between Tx and Rx) and you also at least periodically need to send an ACK packet so that the sender as well as base station knows you both got your packets and that they passed parity checking. It isn't often, but it is about every dozen or so packets that an ACK is needed.

There CAN be different performance at the same modulation rate, but there is only so much leighway for signal strength +/-dB for both sending and receiving at the same modulation rate.

This DOES mean that a transmitter can be a few dB higher in signal strength AND see a bit of a performance boost without the receiver also having as high a power transmitter to reply with (because at the same modulation rate, it can be heard a little better, but since the ACK packets (Tx from client) are much less common than the Rx packets (from basestation) this is fine and the occasional missheard ACK packet is okay).

Look at most setups with a client and basestation, you'll see in inbalance in performance typically on the order of 10-25%, this is in part because most clients are transmitting at 25-32mW and most basestations 60-120mW (depending on modulation schemes in use).

You just can't have a HUGE inbalance, because that provides no benefit at a certain point (that point being roughly the 3dB difference once basestation/clients see now) as the client forces the basestation to a lower modulation rate and increases issues where improper modulation rates can be picked as well as improper roaming (because RSSI is high, even though modulation rates are too low so the client won't roam to a better base station).

 

[stevech]

power imbalance... I like the analogy....
Policeman/fireman.

5 Watt handheld radio.
mountaintop repeater/base station, 100 Watts.

Who can't hear who?

(often, police/fire radio systems have remote receive-only coverage fill-in radi receivers, with the audio sent over phone lines to the system. The system chooses the remote fill-in with the best signal (least noise)).


But we talk of this imbalance fundamental, and then some vendor promotes a 1,000 mW WiFi thing and people think of their car radios (one-way) and assume that 1,000 has to be good.

 

[System Error Message]

most wifi cards transmit at 500mW max and some wifi APs have amplifiers for incoming radio and sensitive receivers to go with their higher transmit power. Most consumer routers are designed to transmit at 100mW to prevent a really bad overcrowding problem.

Its a similar analogy that phones use more battery when they have lower signals by increasing their transmit power. The base station may transmit in the order of many watts while the phone only needs to transmit at a small portion because of the amplifiers at the base station.

 

[azazel1024]

Absolutely not true.

Most wifi cards max at around 32mw with most routers maxing at around 100mw. You can sometimes turn this up a bit through firmware hacks, but even then, most are going to have hardcaps around 100mw or so for wifi cards (and plenty the hard cap is 32mw, no matter what you try to set it to in firmware) and most routers have hard firmware caps in the 200-300mw range.

Some firmware lets you turn it higher, most radio firmware (which is ROM, not NVRAM or RAM, so it CANNOT be altered) ignores the higher power request. So you can crank it to 800wm or whatever if you want it, the radio is still only going to transmit at maybe 200wm of power (which might still be a fair bit higher than factory firmware allows).

All wifi devices have amplifiers in them. However, you are ALSO amplifying noise. So the circumstances in which a really powerful amplifier will help are relatively low if the transmitting chain is weak. If I record a cafeteria full of people talking, playing it back with the volume cranked up probably still doesn't let me isolate your voice, because everything is now louder.

Amplifiers and antennas on the RECEIVE side only improve modulation rate if the noise/interference is very low (antennas though can help more because they can possibly reduce noise/interference by isolating the transmitter more, depending on the type of antenna on the local noise/interferrence environment. Amplifiers cannot do this). Amplifiers and antennas on the transmitter side however can really help.

So the deal is, you need the stuff on BOTH sides for it to really improve things in a lot of cases.

The transmit power at 100mw for most routers has absolutely nothing to do about crowding. AP manufacturers could care less about that. It is also about economical components (because cheap stuff can't handle 1w of transmit power) and how wifi works (again, doesn't work well if you've got a 1w transmitter, but the client has a 25mw transmitter).

Also, keep in mind, radios are not 100% efficient devices. You have 1w of transmit power and you are feeding that radio a lot more power than that...which also means you've gotta DISSIPATE a lot of heat, which means things like heatsinks and such for the amplifiers and radios.

This is triplely an issue with mobile clients. You have a 500mw radio in a laptop and you'll drain the battery a lot faster if the wifi is going full bore. You have a 500mw radio in a cellphone and the battery is going to run flat in an hour or two if you don't cook the thing first (remember, input power > radio transmitter power).

This is also why cellphones tend to last longer on wifi than on cellular. Their cellular radio might be a 25mw radio, where as the cellular radio, because it needs to operate at longer range (even if it is possibly using better frequencies for this...though some are not that good, like the 1900MHz band and such forth) has a much more powerful radio, generally 24dbm/250mw.

Notice that your cell phone battery life at long range might go from "10hrs on wifi" to maybe only 3-4hrs when you are near the edge of cell phone coverage*.

*Cell towers generally have between 43-46dBm radios, or around 40w of transmit power, with much more highly directional antennas, often around 14-16dBi panel antennas so that they can break their cell in to sectors for longer range and higher bandwidth. How GSM/LTE/CDMA, etc. also take in to account the much lower transmit power of a client, which wifi does not as wifi does not allow asynchronous modulation rates.

 

[stevech]

agree - most WiFi, except in 11b mode, transmit about 30-60mW. You might have 2dBi of antenna gain.

It just costs too much to get 100mW + for OFDM.

 

[System Error Message]

not quite true, there are some wifi APs with 1W transmitters in them at less than $100. Mikrotik's newer RB911x with AC wifi as an example.

i remember reading some specifications on miniPCIe wifi cards that they transmit up to 500mW but that may only be some specific brands or models because i have connected to a 1W wifi AP almost at the end of its range.

amplifiers do introduce noise but higher quality amplifers can amplify more with less noise. Its the same with soundcards too.

Some consumer routers do transmit up to 300mW such as some tplink wireless N models but they reduced it to 100mW because of crowding, less interference and country regulations on wifi.