New Routers are coming ...

It should be an interesting couple of months as the new Fritz!Box 7490, Netgear R7000 and Asus RT-AC68U are all due for release.

I am going to pick up the Netgear next week whilst I'm in America (it has a 110v-220v adaptor apparently) so I will be trying that out.

What's the general opinion of 802.11ac? A worthwhile upgrade to 802.11n?

Whilst it makes sense to evolve from 802.11n (a 2009 standard) to 802.11ac, I think its impact at present will be rather limited.


The most important thing to note is that 802.11ac does nothing for 2.4GHz operation - realistically, 802.11n squeezes as much as possible out of that band.

Gradually 5GHz support is becoming the norm, which is a good thing, not least as the band is much wider and less congested than 2.4GHz. I have no problem using 40MHz channel width on 5GHz with my 802.11n gear. The big drawback - and also in some ways, the advantage - of 5GHz is that is usually attenuated much more quickly by distance and building structure than 2.4GHz.


At the moment, 802.11ac is a draft standard, so all devices are being produced to a best guess of the final standard. The only mandatory feature is 80MHz support, which takes the maximum speed per stream from 150Mbit/s (40MHz 802.11n) to 325Mbit/s, or 433.3Mbit/s if the 802.11ac gear supports the optional 256QAM encoding.

Whilst draft 802.11ac allows for other features that will take the speeds and the overall performance far beyond what is achievable on 5GHz 802.11n, the reality is that most consumer 802.11ac gear in the marketplace currently is likely to offer double your 5GHz 802.11n performance at best. It's worth having if available, but I wouldn't be rushing out to replace existing wireless gear.

I find 802.11n on 5GHz performs very well, and have no need of 802.11ac at the moment - but I use Wi-Fi equipment more typically found in enterprise settings (HP MSM460 dual band 3x3 MIMO access points, laptops with Intel 3x3 MIMO cards if possible - this combination can manage up to 450Mbit/s on 5GHz).

Edited by deleted (Fri 25-Oct-13 16:01:12)

Thanks for the info, interesting stuff.

I'm also ordering the Netgear R7000 from ebay USA soon (definitely comes with multi-voltage PSU) to replace my Linksys EA6500. It gets raving reviews over on smallnetbuilder for range and blistering 2.4/5ghz speeds. Also DD-WRT firmware is in the pipeline for R7000 so further customisation possible.

I'm currently using this AC pci adaptor on my desktop and it connects in excess of 800mbps to the Linksys. Hoping the R7000 pushes that up to the magic 1.3gbps

Looking at that equipment, it appears to offer triple stream 433Mbit/s operation (1.3Gbit/s) - a leap up from the triple stream 150Mbit/s (450Mbit/s) of my 802.11n gear for sure, but it's a case of weighing up how important that is to you compared to the cost of implementation.


Maximum wireless throughput is roughly 40% of the underlying bit rate and, of course, the available bandwidth is shared between all stations. Faster wireless is a good thing, but I used wired Gigabit Ethernet wherever possible, which far exceeds the usable bandwidth of even 1.3Gbit/s draft 802.11ac. That being the case, I won't be replacing all my wireless gear with draft 802.11ac any time soon.

For those yet to deploy 5GHz Wi-Fi, there's much more reason to consider deploying draft 802.11ac. 2.4GHz is extremely congested in many areas: my phone is currently seeing seven access points with non-hidden SSIDs on 2.4GHz, eliminating 'duplicate' SSIDs from the same device such as BTFON. That's fairly modest usage compared to some areas.

When in range of one of my 5GHz signals, I find it typically works 4-10 times faster (on actual throughput) than 2.4GHz. As congestion increases on the 5GHz band, performance may well drop, but the lower range of 5GHz and greater number of available channels should help prevent the extreme congestion seen on 2.4GHz in many areas.

In reply to a post by David_W:

When in range of one of my 5GHz signals, I find it typically works 4-10 times faster (on actual throughput) than 2.4GHz. As congestion increases on the 5GHz band, performance may well drop, but the lower range of 5GHz and greater number of available channels should help prevent the extreme congestion seen on 2.4GHz in many areas.

Agree completely. The 5GHz support in the iPhone 5 was a massive reason for me to upgrade, as in most areas I need to use WiFi the 2.4GHz spectrum is over saturated.

I do find 5 GHz useful, but in many UK domestic situations the building construction means its limited to the same room as the AP and the neighbouring rooms.

In my visits to the US I note due to their different construction (designing for hot climate) gives wider airy rooms and thus 5GHz works even better (but is needed because 2.4GHz has little to no attenuation, the whole street interfering).

AC is interesting but none of my 2012/2013 kit supports it, and so I'd only go for it if it came free with the next router upgrade (or my RT-N66U fails) - as like yourself, most of my high bandwidth use cases are on gigabit ethernet

Edited by jchamier (Fri 25-Oct-13 19:45:54)

I've just come back from BestBuy with the router. $199 + tax ($217/total). The power adaptor is a pain as it is a moulded US 'lump of plastic'. As well as a plug convertor (not voltage as you say) it will require some sort of attaching as well as I think it'll be too loose otherwise.

I still have another two weeks working here, so we'll see how it performs when I get home.

I bought a cheap power extension cord, cut off the end and wired a UK plug. Then the (massive) power adaptor plugs quite nicely into the extension.

As for the router, it has good features, has great throughput. The 2.4ghz range is a little disappointing and I would say is slightly worse than the RT-A66U that is replaces. The 5ghz is much better.

I am going to play a bit more with the aerials and see if I can get a better 2.4ghz signal.

Why don't you give DD-WRT firmware a try?

http://www.desipro.de/ddwrt/K3-AC-Arm/

Supposed to have better wifi coverage than stock fw, pretty sure you'll be happy with it. I'll unpack my R7000 in the next day or two and immediately stick DD-WRT on it. If you need instructions:
http://forum1.netgear.com/showpost.php?p=456367&post...