N56U vs N66U 2.4 GHz WAN Throughput

[ariharry]

I have both the N56U and N66U, and over the past few days the N66U has been driving me crazy!

My original N56U was located one floor above my living room (in the office), and the throughput I used to get was good (~5 MBytes/s copying a file from my laptop in the living room to my NAS connected to the N56U on the 2.4 GHz band). Speedtest.net tests resulted in a healthy 35 Mbps down, so I was generally happy.

I've now got a N66U with firmware ver 3.0.0.3.116 and when positioning the router and laptop in the same physical locations, I get some strange results!

File copy is approximately the same ~5 MBytes/s as that of the N56U, but WAN download drops to a poor ~2 Mbps! I tried a variety of speed tester websites (including speedtest.net) and they report the same speed. I even tried a different laptop and my Samsung Galaxy S II, but both report very low throughputs (1-2 Mbps).

If I re-position the laptop to the *same* floor as the N66U, I get a WAN speed of around 55 Mbps (which is near my maximum speed).

I have re-positioned the N66U all over the place upstairs, including changing the orientation of the antennas, but this makes no difference.

So why is the WAN N56U speed minimally affected by floor separation whilst the N66U sucks with WAN throughput only? Signal strength doesn’t seem to be the problem (confirmed with inSSIDer).

Incidentally, I do NOT see this problem on the 5 GHz band, e.g. WAN throughput is fine when both the laptop and N66U are positioned in the same locations.

I am confused and would appreciate some guidance! Thanks!

 

[RMerlin]

Did you enable the option for Bluetooth coexistence in the router? Could be a bluetooth interface on your laptop causing interference when it's too close to your router perhaps. To be totally sure, try disabling any bluetooth radio your laptop might have (if it does have one). That shouldn't affect the WAN speed, but just to be sure best to eliminate that possible variable.

 

[ariharry]

Thanks! That did the trick!

My laptop doesn't have Bluetooth but I disabled my security camera (wireless), cordless phone and Bluetooth connectivity on my cell phone and now I get near-full throughput (speedtest.net).

I don't understand why the N56U to laptop which was set to the same channel number as the N66U didn't suffer as much from other sources of interference.

 

[ariharry]

Did you enable the option for Bluetooth coexistence in the router?

BTW, which option is that? I did a quick search through the options and it isn't immediately obvious.

 

[RMerlin]

BTW, which option is that? I did a quick search through the options and it isn't immediately obvious.

My bad. I thought the RT-N66U had that option, but it only has an option to help the router share 54 Mbits and 450 Mbits devices at the same time on the 2.4 GHz band.

Maybe your RT-N56U had that option, or it was set to use only a 20 MHz channel width (which is less prone to interference, but will affect your wireless speed).

If it turns out it's your phone, you could replace your phones with phones labeled as using Dec 6.0 technology - these do not interfere with wifi networks as they use a different frequency range.

 

[ariharry]

The culprit is my security camera (Lorex LW2702). When I power it off I get maximum throughput on the N66U.

I setup the 2.4 GHz setting on the N66U to mirror what I had on the N56U, but alas interference is still causing problems.

BTW, you can't mirror the settings exactly on the N66U. For example, you can't select 'auto' on the N66U for multicast rate, and the N66U has a couple of control parameters missing (e.g. enables for WMM DLS and packet aggregation). No idea whether these matter.

So far I can only conclude that the N56U is more resilient to interference, but I'll continue to play with the parameters.

BTW, the security camera is supposed to be WIFI and Bluetooth friendly (which appears to be true with the N56U at least ).