Wireless speed dropoff with Intel AC7260 Wireless Card.

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The latest Pro comes with the Broadcom BCM94360CD 3 stream chip with 3 antennas. Would beat the crap out of the 2 stream AC7260 any day.

When comparing with N cards however, the Intel 6300 card is quite comparable to MacBooks with a Broadcom equivalent iirc.

I respectfully acknowledge and perhaps politely disagree...

Intel cards are ok, they're pretty much the on same client side as the Broadcom NIC's in the Apple devices - but from what I've seen across a number of devices, Apple has done their homework on the radio performance compared to Dell/HP/Lenovo...

Tim Higgins had a good article on Antenna/RF, for now I'm not finding the link there...

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I too used to use the changes to settings that you have suggested on my 7260AC when I first installed it, but then I discovered that the power settings had precisely the opposite effect, and they were contributing and/or causing the card to refuse to "wake up" when the computer was returning from sleep/hibernation. I don't recall where I first saw that suggestion (to actually leave the advanced power settings so that it is checked) but it's worked for me to keep it checked. In contrast, years ago, using 802.11g and n cards, I always unchecked this as it would sometimes lead to hard disk errors on the laptop.

Of course, the OP can change whatever settings he thinks will work. I find that it works for me to keep that item checked, and to leave WMM "disabled" as well. Same thing with TX Burst on the router (leave it disabled), and to also leave WMM disabled. I also don't believe "throughput booster" has any effect on 802.11, but instead is designed for 802.11g. But hey, he can certainly give it a go to see if it makes any difference.

Throughput Booster should have been depreciated in the Intel driver stack, thought it was... it's been superceded by WMM/802.11e and the improvements in 11n/11ac... It was Intel's version of Delayed Acknowledgement (DELACK). If one does see this in the driver, it should be disabled, and let WMM do it's thing..

Enable/Disable WMM is only for AdHoc mode - in STA it's controlled by the AP (and should be enabled as per 802.11n/ac rules).

PowerManagement - I've always left them to Max Performance and let the Windows power plan control the card...

I don't have the AC7260, I've got the older N6205 on a ThinkPad T420 - like I mentioned earlier, Intel does very good wifi cards, although they are rather particular about the antenna's and the SW configuration.

Intel, unlike others, runs most of the MAC in the PCH/ICH, and the card has the baseband and radio elements - that's why the driver selection on Intel cards is somewhat critical.

 

[azazel1024]

Not having a Mac/OSX I can't speak to that, but from an iOS/iPhone/iPad side of things, I've noticed that with iOS Apple's network stack is massively more buggy. I've been around since iOS4.0 and I've had narry a network issue across a range of networks on an iPhone 4-5 and iPad 1/2/3. However, under iOS 8+ on a VARIETY of different WLANs, I have occasion wireless drops/lock-ups that require either power cycling the router or power cycling the iOS device to restore connectivity (it has an IP and claims it is connected to wifi, but won't connect to anything. Toggling wifi/airplane mode does nothing, connecting through cellular still works. ALL other devices in the WLAN can still connect wirelessly when this happens).

I've seen it with my iPhone 5, my wife's iPhone 6, her iPad 2, her Grandmother's iPad Mini 3 and annecdotally from several other people and this is across many different networks. It is NOT frequent, but I'd say between our three iDevices we probably experience it twice a month (and it is a PAIN to troubleshoot from 900 miles away a smart, but technically non-proficient 86 year old's connectivity issues when facetime doesn't work (cause wifi broken)).

<=iOS7, never saw a single issue.

So, not sure what is up with that, but in general I see better stability with a number of other wireless devices these days than I do with Apple (I of course see worse too).

 

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iOS8 and OS X 10.10 have been tough with regards to WiFi - totally feel the pain myself as well.

It's gotten better with the point-releases, but some folks have been impacted severely... and the issues are not AP related, it's the driver stack in the devices - Apple rolled quite a few new features into the newer releases, and they replaced mDNSResponder with a newer module that supports Handoff/Continuity, and the AirDrop changes - and fairly broke things...

 

[azazel1024]

Yeah, I had heard of the mDNSresponder issues, I am not as familiar with iOS, but I wonder if there was a similar module that got replaced with the move to iOS8, and that is what is causing the issues.

 

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Yeah, I had heard of the mDNSresponder issues, I am not as familiar with iOS, but I wonder if there was a similar module that got replaced with the move to iOS8, and that is what is causing the issues.

Was replaced by discoveryd - mDNSResponder is still part of OSX 10.10, not so sure about iOS8...

At a driver level, they also included awdl (Apple Wireless Direct Link) as a network element - and between awdl and discoveryd, this is where the real pain is...

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