Having a tough time understanding router advertised speeds vs. actual speeds

[MonsieuRoberts]

I'm interested in understanding exactly how "fast" a specific router is. Let's use a TP link N300 router as an example, the TL-WR841N Wireless N300.

So, this thing advertises 300Mbps speeds. "Wireless N speed up to 300Mbps ideal applications for video streaming, online gaming VoIP, web browsing and multi-tasking." That makes it sound pretty fast, when I know that this is a very low end, entry-level model. If you were to choose, say, a 120 Mbps internet plan from Cogeco as an example, the router would probably be a bottleneck.

So then, what exactly is the 300Mbps being advertised, and how do I derive the actual "speed limit" of the router? How do I know which router would be a proper fit for a specific internet speed? If a customer has a connection that's 200 down or 50 down, or if they have fiber internet that's actually gigabit, what kind of router do they need? I get the basics, and I know broadly what to offer and what to pair them with, but I'm finding it pretty tough to distinguish the speed differences that these companies' routers all advertise, and I'd like a more specific knowledge of the speeds.

I read somewhere on TP Link's website that this specific router, the TL-WR841N, should be able to handle connections up to 90 Mbps...so then, why is that not on the box? Is there a way for me to derive this information? On the new Asus 5300, they show the max speeds that the different bands can support, which is super helpful. It's actually telling you "Hey, if you have a 2 gigabit connection, you're gonna be able to make use of that speed with this router and on these two 5Ghz bands", which I think is great.

It's annoying to just give a ballpark of "Oh, you have 6 devices in the house, you should get an AC 1200." I want to understand where the maximum speed lies, since it's not actually 1200Mbps like it says on the box.

If you have any information to share or any links for me to read, please, post them below. I'd love to be able to say something like "Oh, you just upgraded to 50Mbps down? Then these three routers will all work for you, they won't be a bottleneck for your connection" and actually have the knowledge and information to back up my recommendation.

[f0rb1d]

http://www.cnet.com/products/tp-link...ss-n-router/2/

How far will you be from your router? What wifi adapter are you using?
The problem with the tech and language is they avoid giving a range: speed estimate. Close up it might do 300, or close to it. Far away or behind a wall/kitchen/floors the signal/speed will decrease.
Unfortunately I don't think there will be anything straightforward for wireless internet for awhile. The signal is susceptible by to much.

[Lathais]

From my limited understanding, you should reach the advertised speeds while wired. For wireless, you'll reach those speeds, if using the the best bands -and-, this is the key part, there is no interference. No one can actually tell you if you take a wireless router to a specific house exactly the speeds will be. There are too many variables. At one house, you may get max speeds on the 5gHz band but you go to a different house and both his neighbors are using the 5 gHz band, you'll have interference and will not be able to achieve max speeds, but you will on the 2.4 gHz band. Then, take that same router to a house with a basement and put it in the basement and no one upstairs can even connect due to old house wiring interfering. In another house, you can out it near a rock wall fireplace and everything on that side will be fine, but anything on the other side of the wall will get reduced speeds. There is no possible way to know how much interference will be at any given location though, so the speed they are giving you is theoretically the max it can reach in isolation.

TL;DR : There are too many factors to determine what it will actually get in the real world.

[chazus]

Generally, your speeds will be what your net is capable of. If you have 120mbps internet, your router will always provide that or less (for internet use).

Again, generally speaking, most routers, regardless of what they are, will cap out at about ~150Mbps in a perfect environment, simply because it's important to have compatible receiving hardware as well. But also expect somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-100 due to environment, channel bonding, Mixed networks, wide channels, etc.

It's not that the router can't do that, but that's simply its theoretical best with so many variables. It's like asking how fast your car goes... Well that all depends.. How much gas do you have, what tires, what's the road like, what traffic, weather?

[Vash The Stampede]

Now you know why people get wired connections and try to avoid wireless as much as possible. 300Mpbs is best case scenario, which will almost never happen. There's too many variable that effect wireless speeds. A gigabit Ethernet wire has nearly none.

Also try putting DD-WRT or Open-WRT. Won't increase speeds but might give you more control and you can tweak it a bit to maybe get better speeds.
http://greggborodaty.com/installing-...ink-tl-wr841n/

[MonsieuRoberts]

I'm just asking for the sake of knowing, it's not for me. At home I have a Linksys AC1200 and a Dlink power-over-ethernet gigabit adapter, so my connection is psuedo-wired and AOK. I get my full speed from the modem just fine.

This information makes me question the need for faster and faster routers though, if your basic N300 can handle 75Mbps down straight from the ethernet ports, which is pretty fast for the vast majority of my customers. The advantage of better routers at that point would be two things in my eyes:

1. Gigabit ethernet ports, to support faster internet speeds, up to Fiber stuff.
2. Better, beefier WiFi signals that reach further and can support more data.

Why would you go for an N600 or N750 or N900 if none of them were dual band or gigabit? Seems like a waste. Seems to me like a basic N300 without dual bands or gigabit would be level 1, something like an AC750 that's gigabit would be step 2, and then...I don't even know. If you needed some beefier WiFi, grab something like a 1200 and make sure it's Gigabit and Dual Band. If you have a lot of WiFi devices, grab a 1750 or 1900, again with Gigabit and Dual Band. This is all assuming you've got some fast internet, which I would classify as 60Mbps download or more, which is above average here in St.Catharines.

Am I wrong in my thinking here?

[Ulsaki]

Wireless routers advertise the theoretical max speed under very specific circumstances. The problem is that the layman does not understand how wireless works and under what circumstances you will get those speeds. There are many, MANY complicating factors:

The absolute power of the router. Higher power means a stronger signal, which means less errors, which means more throughput.

What speeds the wireless router allows. This is something that cannot often be set on consumer models, or is hidden deep in advanced settings. If you allow slower speeds, the wireless router will work further away (it falls back to specific slower speeds using different encoding the weaker the signal), but this reduces the bandwidth since the router has to spend all its time talking to the device further away; it hogs the entire channel for longer.

The distance from the router / signal strength. I cover this above.

Interference in the area from other wireless networks, objects in the building, etc.

How many other devices are on the network. All wireless bandwidth is shared and there is overhead for each device (their presence has to be managed). Each device also must not transmit when others are transmitting / receiving and wait.

Wireless is also "half duplex"; upstream and downstream bandwidth is shared. If you have 200 down 50 up the router will work identically to 150 down 100 up (assuming your device can transmit at the same level, which is unlikely. In practice upstream is likely to be slower because your client will likely work at reduced speeds due to having to fall back to slower speeds).

Other technologies such as beamforming which allows for a stronger signal. The interference in your area will also determine if channel bonding is available, which will increase throughput.

The technical specs of the wireless router such as the number of streams supported, antenna etc.

If you want top speeds, a wired connection will win every time. It will be far more secure, is full duplex (upstream and downstream are independent), and far more consistent.

If that's not an option, depending on your property you may consider using multiple access points.

[chazus]

This is all assuming you've got some fast internet, which I would classify as 60Mbps download or more, which is above average here in St.Catharines.

Am I wrong in my thinking here?

Sort of.

A lot of that stuff is not designed for supporting 'fast ethernet' so much as supporting streaming inside the house. It's for when you have your computer in one place, and want to watch TV in another on high def/4k, and need a fast connection inside the house itself, faster than your actual internet connection. For that, people get specialized hardware designed for it (AC1600+) and compatible hardware.

[Lathais]

I'm just asking for the sake of knowing, it's not for me. At home I have a Linksys AC1200 and a Dlink power-over-ethernet gigabit adapter, so my connection is psuedo-wired and AOK. I get my full speed from the modem just fine.

This information makes me question the need for faster and faster routers though, if your basic N300 can handle 75Mbps down straight from the ethernet ports, which is pretty fast for the vast majority of my customers. The advantage of better routers at that point would be two things in my eyes:

1. Gigabit ethernet ports, to support faster internet speeds, up to Fiber stuff.
2. Better, beefier WiFi signals that reach further and can support more data.

Why would you go for an N600 or N750 or N900 if none of them were dual band or gigabit? Seems like a waste. Seems to me like a basic N300 without dual bands or gigabit would be level 1, something like an AC750 that's gigabit would be step 2, and then...I don't even know. If you needed some beefier WiFi, grab something like a 1200 and make sure it's Gigabit and Dual Band. If you have a lot of WiFi devices, grab a 1750 or 1900, again with Gigabit and Dual Band. This is all assuming you've got some fast internet, which I would classify as 60Mbps download or more, which is above average here in St.Catharines.

Am I wrong in my thinking here?

The perfect example of why they have those things for sale is my Dad. The other day he went out to buy a new router without checking with me first. He was very proud of himself that he had bought this router all on his own. He, "chose the best one" by himself. It offered speeds of up to something like 10x what his internet was capable of. When I asked him why he didn't just buy the cheapest one like I told him he said it's because this one is faster. I explained to him that it will not magically make his internet faster by explaining it to him with a car analogy. Think of the router as a highway, you have a car that can go 200 MPH. Does the car go faster on a 4 lane highway than a 2 lane highway?

In short, they sell them because people are stupid and will buy them anyway.

[Ghâzh]

In short, they sell them because people are stupid and will buy them anyway.

Combine this with what chazus said. There's an actual need for fast streaming / data transfer within the home network but the people who actually do this is minimal compared to the amount of people who buy them because they are clueless.

What I think is an interesting question is can a router reach it's maximum wireless speed under any circumstance? Because from what I've seen that hasn't been the case in any router review ever.

[Djinni]

I explained to him that it will not magically make his internet faster by explaining it to him with a car analogy. Think of the router as a highway, you have a car that can go 200 MPH. Does the car go faster on a 4 lane highway than a 2 lane highway?

In short, they sell them because people are stupid and will buy them anyway.

Perhaps, but if you have 8 or more cars... (as a family of 4 typically has more than 8 connected devices in their home) it sure does make a difference ;-)

[Artorius]

Hmm... I'll try to explain.

At a router you have a combination of bands, frequencies and channels that you can operate at. The advertised speed is the combined speed that you can achieve when the Router is using all of them. In your case, it doesn't mean that you can cast a single device with 300mbps unless you have a multi-antenna adapter configured to use them all at different channels.

Also, this isn't exactly speed we're talking about. This is band width. The electromagnetic signal irradiated from the antennas is traveling at light speed. If you ping your router you'll generally get the answers in 1~2ms.

- - - Updated - - -

From my limited understanding, you should reach the advertised speeds while wired. For wireless, you'll reach those speeds, if using the the best bands -and-, this is the key part, there is no interference.

Any half-decent router will have gigabit ethernet ports. The wired "speed" is different from the wireless one.

[Deleted]

What I think is an interesting question is can a router reach it's maximum wireless speed under any circumstance? Because from what I've seen that hasn't been the case in any router review ever.

Yes - routers never allocate 100% of the bandwidth to a single client however as the protocol necessitates some space be left reserved to allow other stations to send (even if none are known), along with other necessities such as beacon broadcasts. But the actual data transfer, while it occurs, is done at the specified rate.

The benefit of a high-speed wireless device (whether its 3G/4G/WiFi) is that it can get the same transmission done at a lower network capacity tax - reducing the effect of congestion.

[Vash The Stampede]

Why would you go for an N600 or N750 or N900 if none of them were dual band or gigabit? Seems like a waste. Seems to me like a basic N300 without dual bands or gigabit would be level 1, something like an AC750 that's gigabit would be step 2, and then...I don't even know. If you needed some beefier WiFi, grab something like a 1200 and make sure it's Gigabit and Dual Band. If you have a lot of WiFi devices, grab a 1750 or 1900, again with Gigabit and Dual Band. This is all assuming you've got some fast internet, which I would classify as 60Mbps download or more, which is above average here in St.Catharines.

Am I wrong in my thinking here?

Dual band routers have both 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz connections. The idea is that 5Ghz can be faster but doesn't penetrate walls very well. The 2.4Ghz signal can, but is a bit slower. The 5Ghz signal isn't new either, as we've had 802.11a but was left behind because a lot of things could interfere with it. Now it's back but with newer and better technology.

The idea of buying a more expensive AC router is that when the signal is weaker, you'd still have better speeds compared to G or N. If you're sitting right next to your router then N is plenty fine. If you need more signal is some parts of your home then you could just get a better antenna. I bought a yagi antenna and hooked it up to an old Verizon FIOS router that I put DD-WRT on, and then hooked up a yagi antenna. Where I am in the building I get another 10% more signal. It's just a 802.11G router.

[MonsieuRoberts]

Sort of.

A lot of that stuff is not designed for supporting 'fast ethernet' so much as supporting streaming inside the house.

Oh, okay.

It's for when you have your computer in one place, and want to watch TV in another on high def/4k, and need a fast connection inside the house itself, faster than your actual internet connection.

Oh...okay...?

For that, people get specialized hardware designed for it (AC1600+) and compatible hardware.

Okay Chazus, you lost me. Why exactly would my network connection need to be faster than my internet connection if I wanted to stream video?

[Artorius]

Oh, okay.
Oh...okay...?
Okay Chazus, you lost me.

Transferring data locally doesn't have anything to do with your internet plan, that's why you need more robust routers to do it.

A normal bluray at 1080p has a bitrate of 40Mbps, you can theoretically stream it to your TV using your LAN. But try doing it over a crowded 2.4GHz wireless network and you won't be able to do it without stops for buffering. Having a AC router with a lot of antennas (those "AC1600+" routers have a lot of different antennas and this 1600 is the sum of them all) is better because they can handle the devices separately and don't bottleneck themselves.

If you have a normal N300 router with 2 antennas and try to stream a video file to a TV while downloading a torrent or something else at your computer, one of the two will get miserably speeds and you won't be able to do it. Since it's a physical limitation of the router itself and not at your internet plan.


So we can understand the local network band as the amount of data that can travel between your router and your devices, if you're using the internet or not.

So yeah, doing a simple example, if you have a router/adapter that can go as high as 30Mbps and your internet plan is of 30Mbps, you'll get your real speeds just fine. If you try to use the same local network to transfer something between local devices then you'll have a slowdown problem if you're using the entire bandwidth with the internet already. If you have the same 30Mbps internet plan but your local network is gigabit, you can use the entire internet bandwidth and transfer files through the network at the same time without any problems.

The conclusion is even if you won't ever use the entire bandwidth of the router, a router with more antennas will perform better at places with a lot of devices connected to it.

[MonsieuRoberts]

Transferring data locally doesn't have anything to do with your internet plan, that's why you need more robust routers to do it.

A normal bluray at 1080p has a bitrate of 40Mbps, you can theoretically stream it to your TV using your LAN. But try doing it over a crowded 2.4GHz wireless network and you won't be able to do it without stops for buffering. Having a AC router with a lot of antennas (those "AC1600+" routers have a lot of different antennas and this 1600 is the sum of them all) is better because they can handle the devices separately and don't bottleneck themselves.

If you have a normal N300 router with 2 antennas and try to stream a video file to a TV while downloading a torrent or something else at your computer, one of the two will get miserably speeds and you won't be able to do it. Since it's a physical limitation of the router itself and not at your internet plan.


So we can understand the local network band as the amount of data that can travel between your router and your devices, if you're using the internet or not.

So this is in reference to streaming content on your local network, like from a NAS or something. Becuase that I understand. For a crowded home network, more "lanes", more choices in channels for data to flow through, is better.

[Artorius]

So this is in reference to streaming content on your local network, like from a NAS or something. Becuase that I understand. For a crowded home network, more "lanes", more choices in channels for data to flow through, is better.

Yeah, that's the same principle for dual band adapters where you put the downstream and upstream separated so they can't interfere with one another. Virtually doubling your band as well. That's what those N600 modems are doing.

Normal N150 router will broadcast at 2.4GHz (or 5GHz in some cases) and use a 20MHz bandwidth, this gives you ~145Mbps. N300 does the same with a 40Mhz bandwidth, so it doubles the number.

N600 however has 2 300 channels, operating at 2.4GHz and 5.0Ghz.

[Lathais]

Okay Chazus, you lost me. Why exactly would my network connection need to be faster than my internet connection if I wanted to stream video?

Not talking about streaming from the internet, talking about streaming from a PC in your house to a TV in a different part of your house. It's not something a lit of people really do though is possible. In this case, your internet speed simply does not matter. You want a router that offers fast as possible speeds for 4K resolution streaming. Even 1080p streaming can eat a LOT of bandwidth and 4K carried 4 times the data.