The Joys of 802.11ac WiFi
by Jarred Walton on July 8, 2013 8:15 PM ESTClosing Thoughts (for Now)
It’s really up to the notebook manufacturers to make sure that their WiFi implementations are up to snuff, and that means doing more than a quick test for connectivity in ideal test conditions. The QA and engineering departments at the very least ought to be testing at 5, 25, 50, and 100 feet, using standard Windows operations (i.e. not just IxChariot or iPerf). If there are issues, they should be ironed out before customers (and reviewers) get the product. With that said, a good foundation for wireless networking can go a long way toward improving bandwidth and stability of your connection.
Intel’s adapters aren’t always the best, but they’re rarely the worst, provided you get one of the non-budget offerings (i.e. avoid the 1000 and 2000 series parts). Realtek unfortunately comes in near the bottom of my ranking list in many cases, but most notebooks with Realtek WiFi are already cutting corners—they’re the 1x1:1 2.4GHz only solutions that are so common. The fact is, whether you're using an adapter from Qualcomm/Atheros, Broadcom, Marvell, Realtek, or Ralink, you can have a good adapter in some cases or a downright awful one in others. Broadly speaking, most solutions with two streams end up being better than any of the single stream solutions.
Of course, it's not just about spatial streams. Oddly enough, for a company that has been on the forefront of wireless technologies, as Anand detailed in our MacBook Air 2013 review OS X is not scaling TCP window size beyond 64KB and thus fails to get optimal performance out of 802.11ac. (I assume an OS/driver patch will address this at some point, but that hasn't happened yet AFAIK.) OS and driver issues can definitely put a clamp on WiFi performance, which again is why the notebook makers need to exercise due diligence and test in real-world scenarios to ensure their hardware is working properly.
As I said earlier, one of the best things about 802.11ac wireless is that it raises the bar for wireless adapters. No one can get away with selling you an 11ac adapter without including at the bare minimum a dual-band chipset with support for 5GHz and 2.4GHz networks. If you live in a packed subdivision or apartment complex, 5GHz networking is almost required these days. Ideally, though, I want more than just the bare minimum; I want two 80MHz streams on my 802.11ac connections, and three would be even better. Intel’s 7260 provides two streams, and so do most of the current crop of 802.11ac routers. Hopefully, we won’t see as many solutions going for the bottom of the barrel single stream implementations; they’re not worse than 802.11n, but they’re not much better than two stream 5GHz 802.11n either.
Consider this a warning shot across the bow of the notebook manufacturers: we’re going to be paying more attention to your wireless implementations going forward. I can understand why a $500 or less budget laptop needs to cut every corner possible to hit that price point, but when we’re looking at $1000+ laptops we don’t want to see such blemishes. It may not always be as painful as using a bad LCD on an otherwise excellent laptop, but a bad WiFi implementation that loses connectivity if you’re more than 40 feet from the router in can be even worse in some cases.
We’ll be doing some full reviews of 802.11ac routers in the near future, including the Western Digital AC1300 and Linksys AC1200. The full reviews will better characterize performance as well as other features. Until then, at least right now it looks like most 802.11ac routers are using two streams (867Mbps maximum theoretical throughput), which is at least a nice upgrade over the 300Mbps so many 802.11n routers offer. Meanwhile, Apple's latest AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule go whole hog and give us three streams and up to 1300Mbps. Now if I could just get (Windows) laptops with three 802.11ac streams, I might actually be willing to give up my Gigabit Ethernet and wires!
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Sylvala - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link
Apple implentation is the best? lol http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/07/apple-patches...JarredWalton - Sunday, July 21, 2013 - link
Don't mistake the Air problems with Apple issues in general. Apples WiFi in the past has been far better on most laptops, at least on the MacBook Pro line. They've had dual-band 3x3:3 with two chipsets in their AirPort Extreme for many years now, and the result has been very good performance.phoenix_rizzen - Monday, July 22, 2013 - link
In the comprehensive review, would it be possible to test combined throughput for multiple clients connected to the same AP?While it's great to benchmark/measure the throughput a single client connected to a single AP can achieve, that's not very realistic compared to how wireless is actually used, even in single-family homes. It's very rare you'll see a single device connected to an AP, what with the proliferation of phones, tablets, laptops, and consoles in homes these days. And workplaces are even worse.
Perhaps as a final benchmark, you could run the download test on every laptop simultaneously and measure the overall throughput from the AP? Would be interesting to see how each AP handles that situation.
JarredWalton - Monday, July 22, 2013 - link
I can certainly try that; usually, though, what you get is a high burst of traffic from one client for a bit, then another high burst, etc. If you are running a file server with lots of wireless clients, you'd really want to go with distributed access points most likely -- unless you're in a small area, and then a single AP might be sufficient.agrntn - Sunday, September 1, 2013 - link
What is '802.11'?uio77 - Saturday, December 28, 2013 - link
Hello wireless gurus:I just got one of this WD my net bridge AC adapter and connected to the 5G band to a Netgear Nighthawk. To measure how fast the transfer speed is I copied a file from my NAS to my desktop and the speed do not pass 4mbps. I tried changing setting in the router but no luck. The setting in the bridge are almost none. Do any of you have an idea in why this think is given me such a lame speed over AC, Thanks guys
mshirley1964 - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
I recently upgraded to comcast's x1 platform and it came with a dual band router.I just got an 802.11ac usb wifi adapter for my laptop and just check out the before
and after results:
http://productresearch.info/802-11ac-speed-demon-n...
mshirley1964 - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
I recently upgraded to comcast's x1 platform and it came with a dual band router.I just got an 802.11ac usb wifi adapter for my laptop and just check out the before
and after results:
http://productresearch.info/802-11ac-speed-demon-n...
Aint that amazing?!
Mike-
Barney4 - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
I don't know why others have had problems, but I have had mine running non-stop (apart from electrical blackouts of course) since new.That is over 5 years now!
Not one disconnection or problem - EVER!!
We have a old federation double brick house, so that causes a little distance problem, but it still gets a signal through 3 walls for a distance of about 50 feet (depending on the connecting device) before losing the signal.
With only one obstructing wall we get somewhere between 50 to about 75 feet depending on the connecting device.
I must admit to changing the antennae to a better one (a 9dB) which has given it a much more consistent and stronger signal at distance.
All I have done is plug it in, set it up and never touched it since.
I am also running 3x different Uniden cordless phone systems (900mHz, 2.4GHZ and 5GHz), recently I have 2x TV's and 2x computers plus 3x mobile phones which use widi. None of this causes any interference.
Can not figure out why so many people have had their router"s cause problems, could be some sort of interference problem, maybe even the external devices used, because the Netcomm NP804N has worked just as it is supposed to. And flawlessly!