WiFi 6 + Intel AX200. What to really expect?

@ etern4l

Extenders are not the way to go if you're looking for consistent speeds and being able to manage them to your liking.

The biggest issue most extenders have is that they cut your bandwidth in 1/2 to use that as a backhaul to the originating base station.

4x4 cards are available and they're only going to be found on a desktop unless you opt for something like an external PCI / USB box but that's cumbersome for a laptop and not to mention very pricey. I was using a 4x4 card as an AP from Qnap - QWA-AC2600 which has dual radios / one for each band using the same QCA-9984 chips found in routers like the R7800 but being able to internalize it into a custom setup allowed for managing it better. Also, with making it an AP instead of a client allows you to push the speed limits based on your network card (ethernet) whether a single 1GE or bundling a couple of ports together to exceed the bandwidth of the QWA card for end to end connectivity over 1GE wifi to lan ot wifi to wan.

Asus and others make 4x4 cards as well for use in desktops and they're well rated in reviews. Each card varies though from Qualcomm / Realtek and 1 other manufacturer I can't seem to recall at the moment but they all have differing applications like the RTL ones typically work better in Mac's but QCA work well in *nix and windows just doesn't care usually.

If you want an AP / router with 2.5GE it's going to depend on how your setup is. As to the dual routers / same SSID you can and the client just picks the one with the strongest signal. The issue you might run into is routing internally and externally if they're using different IP scopes on either side. However if you put them into a switch and assign the IP from the switch you could just use them as AP's and then route the traffic from another device in front of the switch between the ISP and your switch.

As to tri-band..... sometimes this has a 3rd band for the backhaul and won't affect your bandwidth but, a true AP gives you no drops in bandwidth provided you have the necessary cabling / ports in place to support your speed requirements. Some AP's when I was looking around offered the 2.4gbps as an aggregate w/o 160mhz channels (this limits you to 1/2 or less than 2.4gbps).

80mhz AC = 866
160mhz AC = 1733

So, as you can see the 80mhz below on AX (6/6E) already gives you a 400mbps boost.

80mhz AX = 1200
160mhz AX = 2400

WIFI 5 vs 6... The difference is how the card / AP handles the signal. Max on 5 is 1733 for 160mhz / if you can't get 160mhz up and running due to interference you're not going to see those speeds and 80+80 may be an option and you also have to take into consideration the whole DFS radar issue that will prevent locking that spectrum in for use if the detection software gets a response when scanning your whole system recalibrates.

Max per client on 6/6E is 1200mbps (80mhz) and 2.4gbps (160mhz/80+80). So, with 6/6E you get a more consistent speed that hits that 1GE threshold of your physical port vs the throttled feel of the 1733 which can hit 1GE speeds but that's the bottleneck if you don't support a higher port speed as 99.999% of AC routers don't have a port speed higher than 1GE like you can find with 6/6E devices that are starting to show up on the market.

 

Thank you for your help. I should have mentioned I use the extender in AP/Ethernet backhaul mode. It was a bit of a hasty purchase, I kind of failed to do my homework:
1. I didn't understand I need VHT160 support to get 1733 out of my existing devices suppoting 1733 ac
2. I thought an extender would uniquely make it easy to create a single SSID - Netgear have made this into a "smart connect" feature. It's not clear what the mechanism or added value is.
Would this smart connect act like load balancing, i.e. re-routing clients from a busy 5Ghz band to another (assuming the same link speed, so client-side mechanisms wouldn't work)? If so, that would be a cool feature, but we don't know that.

This Netgear EX8000 is working very well as intended, except I can't utilize the 2nd 5Ghz band in 1733 mode, which was probably the main temptation.
So, given the slight disappointment, I'm now looking at alternatives:
* QNAP QHORA-301W - https://www.qnap.com/en/product/qhora-301w - as suggested by @Aivxtla, this ticks almost all the boxes on paper, including 10GbaseT ports (doesn't look like it supports link aggregation though?), but can't seem to find any reviews, not clear how well the internal antennas work and 6E is just around the corner, so might pass at this point
* A cheapo Huawei AX3 - it does support 160Mhz channels so should be able to hit 1733 Mhz on a my ac devices supporting Wave 2. I could then upgrade to 6E cards later on, and eventually get a target 6E router.
Need to read up more - thanks again for your advice.

 

You don't need to replace everything and get a new router.

What you can do is get an access point which is a cheaper option and provides better signal quality than most consumer options. You can tie together AP's in a "mesh" by assigning the same SSID profiles to each of them and setting them on non-overlapping channels for smooth client hand off.

i.e. set one on the lower bands for 5G say 36-48 and the next one on the higher channels 102-149 and when the client picks up a stronger signal from one or the other it changes over and keeps working.

https://dongknows.com/qnap-qhora-301w-ax3600-sd-wan-wi-fi-6-router-review/

160mhz TBD based on a FW upgrade and being $350 doesn't make much sense. There are plenty of 6 devices that are much cheaper. 6 devices that have 160mhz are a bit limited but they can be found.

https://dongknows.com/wi-fi-6-explained/

https://www.wi-fi.org/product-finde...ries=4&capabilities=189&keywords=access point

Otherwise if you want to throw money at Netgear / QNAP / Huawei feel free. QNAP has some good stuff when it comes to the tech field but, the consumer stuff is lacking. I've used their NAS / Networking stuff and it's alright to an extent depending on what you want to use it for. The NAS i had performed alright but the prepackaged limitations / price moving on from a limited use just didn't make sense.

I used the QWA-AC2600 as an AP because it was similar to the R7800 I wanted to eliminate and integrate into the PC I built to be the catch all for several devices and increased security.

When going to the 5GE iteration I swapped the QWA for Zyxel AP NWA210AX ($229) and flipped my GE cards for a 5GE 4 port QXG-5G4T-111C. ($200)

So, there's a pro/con you have to weigh out and consider when you get ease of use vs long term ROI. If you outgrow a pre-packaged solution then you lose money churning the equipment for the next upgrade. If you put something together yourself you lose less and get more intimate with the functions of things and interoperability of them as well.

When 6E gets to fruition though I simply have to swap the NWA210AX for the next version and put the 210 on ebay to recover 80% of the value for the 6E upgrade instead of rethinking all of the other pieces of the puzzle because the infrastructure investment / foundation is already there with the card / cabling / poe injector.

When you have all of the components in a package with a bow on them you're limited to whatever the MFG decides is best for the masses and not you in particular which is why everyone is still messing around with 1GE. Which is also why the ISP's don't push anything over 1GE. Which is why we over pay for internet mb/s. Sure a 2GE symmetrical for $300/mo can be enticing to some but the cost per gbps just doesn't make sense when you can get 1gbps for ~$100/mo. Is that 2GE uplink worth it if most of your traffic is downstream? Depends.... If you have to upload huge files the pain of using the 40mbps of the $100 plan vs 2GE of the $300 plan might make more sense if time is of the essence.

Wave 2 / 1733 / 160mhz.... It has its place but, AX / 6 makes it less worthwhile when you can swap WIFI cards for $20/device and leave it in the dust. If you're forward thinking and future proofing things then AX all around is the way to go. Let's put it this way the 210AX AP I have gives near 100% signal for 1300sq ft without blinking an eye. I could probably mount it in the hallway of my floor and cover 6 units of traffic with it fairly easily. When you buy the mass marketed junk that's over priced and under performing you just keep feeding the machine. Switching to something more substantial for the same or less money makes more sense.

Using this type of AP would also work more on the SMB side of the house vs Enterprise because of some of the E requirements for service/replacement SLA's with vendors. It's taken awhile to get responses from Zyxel on more of an engineering type questions than say Cisco that turns around within an hour. Getting support for an item on a forum....that wouldn't work very well in a business situation and on a home situation sometimes it will work fine if there's enough traffic on the site to get a response in a timely manner.

Evaluating your next move depends on a few factors. Size of the space, speed desired, and budget. Client upgrades will help in the overall experience of deploying the new network devices in optimizing the speeds and how traffic is handled. Being that AP's tend to have multiple SSID profiles per radio you can isolate the older devices to the 2.4ghz radio and keep the 5ghz free for newer / faster devices and take advantage of the newer features of the new standard. As you have already experienced the lackluster control of "consumer" devices / extenders you already understand that they don't have much options for tweaking and getting the most out of your client devices.

 

@etern4l 1733/2400 Mbps link rate on a 4x4 router isn't a scam as that's the max capability of the radio. Additionally even if you have only a 2 or 3 stream client the extra streams on the router side can add to the antenna diversity for better signaling. Also it's up to you to have clients to avail of all 4 streams. Plus if you have like 2 2x2 MU capable clients they can connect in parallel and use all 4 streams of the router...a standard router switches between individual clients one at a time in a round robin fashion, when you have 2 or more MU clients it creates groupings so you can have multiple devices rather than one rotating. If you only have 1 MU device (Or even just one active alone) the router can't create a transmit grouping so client is treated a standard SU-MIMO device. Qualcomm 8x8/4x4 routers actually only use half the streams with HT160 enabled. Additionally another caveat of MU is that some Broadcom MU clients like the Galaxy S7 and others would drop from a 2x2 to a 1x1 mode when MU was enabled on routers, maybe fixed on newer BCM chipsets. QCA and Intel chipset MU clients didn't face this.

As for why you can't get HT160 in use, it depends on your location/region and restrictions there plus if you live in a area with a nearby weather radar or other priority device/service you won't have HT160, the router will drop you to HT80. Routers are required to scan intermittently to see if they can use DFS channels. Non DFS channels ranges are 36-48 and 149-165 (each channel is 20Mhz, so by default at HT80 all those channels would be in use in either the 36-48 or 149-157 range) but with HT160 would need to use additional DFS channels even if you selected a non DFS primary as there aren't enough contiguous non DFS channels for HT160. There is even a HT80+80 split bonding mode but not many clients including your Intel 9260ac (Killler 1550) even support it, AX200/210 might though.

 

Thanks again for your help.
Good point about my not strictly needing a router (which is why I went with an extender - essentially an AP with optional wireless backhaul), but a router could come in handy in the future and pretty much all of them work in AP mode. Or so if it would seem... There are pitfalls. Specifically, I locked in on an Asus 86U or something like that. About the same price as the Zyxel AP, ticks all the boxes roughly: 160Mhz, 2.5G, link aggregation, an even use USB 4G modems, but.. After heavy digging, I found out the link aggregation doesn't work in AP mode!! Seriously?

The Zyxel AP looks like a good option, how do the internal antennas perform?

The Huawei AX3 (Pro) - it's hard to talk about throwing money at this since it's dirt cheap,. Looked like a great stop-gap, but ii phones home a lot, and firmware updates/support look like a mess. Decided against it for these reasons.

Netgear also has some good routers, like the RAX120 or RAX200, but they cost even more than 10G QNAP, about twice as much as your Zyxel AP.

At the moment I'm trying to decide whether to forget it for now and just keep the ac infrastructure until 6E arrives and matures a little, or return it and get a stop-gap 2-antenna AX router/extender + a couple of cheapo AX210NGD cards. Here again, some mixed messages about the stability of those 6E cards/ drivers. The problem this would hopefully solve is that my uplink at about 7m through two walls is at around 500Mbps, which I understand to be excellent. Not sure it's worth spending time on trying to improve this using cheapo 2-anthenna AX. @Aivxtla what do you think?

The devices I am still consider!ng though:

* Belkin AX3200 - apparently it's sold at Walmart (£80). Reliability is a slight concern.

* Netgear RAX20 - AX1800, 4 stream (£110). The thing is that Netgear docs advise using it in mesh mode (with SSID sharing), whereas other routers have the smart connect options (not sure if the belkin does though). Either they want to push their extender line, or it is a real issue.
The manual says:
"Note: To avoid interference with other routers or gateways in your network, we recommend that you use different WiFi settings on each router. You can also turn off the WiFi radio on the other router or gateway and use this router only for WiFi client access."

I think it may just refer to channel config, but also they don't mention any ability to support shared SSID, there is no word on how the router manages access to the two bands. My guess is that this indicates lack of 802.11k support:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11k-2008

Same story with the Belkin - I guess, that's it: all those mesh/"smart connect" device support 802.11k, and some of the cheaper options don't.

There was also this £65 TP-link 505X extender, not sure why I dropped it lol ah, it's rated as AX1500, which is weird - it looks like it doesn't do anything for the 2.4Ghz band? https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/range-extender/re505x/

Ah also, it claims one needs a Zyxel router to mesh with the router WiFi which put me off:

"
TP-Link OneMesh TM
OneMeshTM is a simple way to form a Mesh network with a single WiFi name for seamless whole-home coverage. Just connect an OneMeshTM range extender to an OneMeshTM router so you can stop searching around for a stable connection.'

Netgear extenders claim compatibility with all routers.

I could also swap the Netgear EX8000 for EAX20 which is a 2 rather than 6 antenna device, rated at 1500sq ft rather than 2500 sq ft. Same price.

I looked at SMB level APs and could not find anything worthwhile in the stop-gap category.

It's def not a great time to upgrade WiFi APs, everything is throwaway given the incoming 6E.

Thank you, very clear. The reason that the EX8000 doesn't work In VHT160 mode is that it doesn't support it. I got caught out by the 1733 claim, which - as you said - is technically true in terms of the overall bandwidth available to multiple clients, or a single client using a PCIe Asus adapter with external 4 antennas

Your post sheds some light on why my current well-reviewed 6-antenna AC AP might actually outperform a cheapo AX APs in practice, especially at longer distances. 500mbps uplink (over an uncontested DFS channel) at 7m through two walls is not bad to begin with . I guess there is only one way to really find out.

 

Based on http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-to-really-expect.834073/page-6#post-11069699 I would either go with zyxel or Netgear.

As to the antenna pattern..... It doesn't really matter as long as it covers your space. If you have a big area the Zyxel will cover it pretty well and if you have a dead spot you add another one and configure them to work together in the AP settings.

If you want to keep down the road of cheap you'll likely be swapping out equipment before admitting defeat and stepping up to a purpose designed device.

You've already talked yourself out of the majority of the devices you listed.

I put in the time and have the experience for my recommendation by comparing all of the devices on the market outside of the commonplace consumer companies. I looked for the best performance options that ticked the boxes to not be obsolete when the next series of devices get released and this is where I landed w/o spending a ton of money. ~$300 was my threshold for the WIFI portion as you can easily go beyond it in the consumer market for a router / mesh / AP with inferior options that look like they have 20 antennae. More isn't always better when it comes to the array as you'll not see any benefits by installing a porcupine looking device.

Looking at the technical aspects of devices is where the $ is for the performance. Weighing the 6 or 6E right now isn't a huge leap of faith since 6E devices have yet to show up anywhere outside of repurposed / slightly modified existing devices to add filters / antenna and a markup for them.

Thumb through this site and it goes into details of wifi and is pretty comprehensive in debunking WIFI
https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html

 

Thanks again for all the wealth of information. I think I finally have a working grasp on this space. For example I couldn't work out why the bother with these 3 or 6 Gbps routers and extenders - basically the extra bandwidth is mostly needed to support effective wireless backhaul. Also, the smart roaming / mesh features are probably not a pure gimmick, they are talking about 802.11k, which most devices (among the stop-gap consumer options I have been looking at) seem to lack support for.

Anyway, Indeed I have shortlisted your Zyxel NWA210AX and Netgear EAX20 AP/extender (not the RAX20 router, which does not support 802.11k smart roaming). It's not exactly a pre-6E stop-gap, but I have some bandwidth space at 5GHz, so base AX should last for a while.

At £200, the Zyxel ticks almost all the boxes: * VHT160 * 2.5GE * 802.11.k and v. The only worries are:
* Range provided by the 2 internal radios - so far haven't found much info on the expected coverage
* Ditto beamforming
* Security? Read some bad news on Zyxel recently
* Can the cloud features be disabled? Don't want any calling home or backdoors

This would just plug in to my existing setup, don't have to worry about PoE, it has an AC adapater. Then could upgrade the switch to 2.5/5/10G with link aggreggation, without worrying whether a router supports it properly or not, and voila - here comes true wireless 2gbps connection to the NAS

Netgear EAX20 is about £50 cheaper but has half the bandwidth, no VHT160, no 2.5GE, also just 2 internal antennae, so it's all but gone from the shortlist pending clearance of the Zyxel concerns above.

Hope to finalize the research and pull the trigger tonight, along with a sensible AX200/210 card to test drive in a laptop (just a bunch of nonames so far on amazon, would prefer something branded).

Best.

 

I picked up the AX210's on Amazon for under $20/ea with a Amex promo that since expired that offered a 20% discount by using a MR point during checkout. There multiple options but the link above is the one I went with. There some others though that offer PCIE adapters / antenna setups if you were looking to use them in a desktop application. The 210 over 200 though for stability and performance is my recommendation in addition to the 210 being 6E enabled it cuts the need to replace them again when 6E AP's start arriving in the next 6-12 months.

As you pointed out with netgear being cheaper you lose options. Extenders are a band aid to a solution. Budget is a concern for most and it's not that big of a gap when comparing the features of NWA210AX vs the competition. If you're spending ~$200 you might as well make a lasting investment that gives 100% performance rather than pinch pennies for something you're not going to be happy with the performance.

One caveat I pointed out to Zyxel recently is the 2.5gbps performance is hobbled with their QOS/WMM limiting speeds to 1gbps. Whether they include this removal of the cap in the next software release or not depends on how they change the code or if they're willing to. As to the 2.5ge port issue... there's a cheap switch you can use to enable the function for about ~$100 instead of investing $500 for a more robust Netgear or Unifi branded switch.

QNAP QSW-1105-5T

As to the whole POE vs AC power adapter. If you're hiding wires and ceiling mounting one of these POE would be the option to go for and the issue comes to be whether you want to go 2.5ge or 10ge on the injector side. I went with a 10ge poe injector since it was only a $15 difference.
TPE-215GI - 2.5ge poe @ $55
PT-PSE104GB-60-10 - up to 10ge @ $69

Since I'm running short cables and proximity I got a AC splitter cable for the PC / POE to run 1 outlet for both. I went POE just to simplify cabling as it's 1 out from the PC to the POE and 1 to the AP instead of tangling power/ethernet and creating a mess.

 

I would stick with what you have unless you’re current setup isn’t meeting your needs. A wait for 6E is probably worthwhile as products will start rolling in this year client and AP side. Also yes a good/stable AC router would be better than a new/untested or unreliable AX model. So look at some reviews and research before diving in. I use my RAX120 in AP mode. Recent firmwares have been a little buggy. The RAX200 also had some major bugs till a few months back, but should be ok now. Not sure I’d spend that much money over what you have though unless you really need to or maybe you a tech enthusiast wanting to adopt the latest.

 

Thank you, I've been looking at the exact same AX210. OK, I would try that then.

The 2.5GE being unavailable on the Zyxel is giving me a pause. Is that only when the QOS/WMM is enabled? I would not need QoS anyway. If the 2.5GE doesn't work at full speed all, then that partially defeats the purpose of the device.

Thanks a lot for the switch and PoE injector recommendations - will tap into that once I sort out this AP thing.

Yeah, I looked at the RAX120 too - looked great 5GE + link aggregation, Smart Connect (including .11k presumably), but at £400 it doesn't make sense now..

The situation is that I just bought this EX8000 extender, in part hoping to get 1733Mbps bandwidth out of AC1550, but overlooked the absence of VHT160 support. I now understand that the EX8000 is probably overkill for me, unless the 6 antennae are helpful even when handling a single device.. It seems I don't really need tri-band router, since I'm not using wireless backhaul. I don't have much internal contention, however, I would like to see max throughput from a single device. The extender did provide massive improvement, roughly 10x more throughput in Samba benchmarks over my very old ISP-provided router (.11n I believe). Still, I can return that if there is a better alternative within similar budget. The EX8000 "only" delivers around 400-500Mbs to one of the sites I'd like to cover at ca. 7 meters through two walls, so the question is: could I eke out more, perhaps the whole 1Gbps out of an AX AP. The problem is that it's hard to tell based on reviews. For example, Tom's hardware claims that the EAX20 extender delivers worse performance at longer distances than the AC-based EX8000, which is counterintuitive. Hence the plan to get an alternative AP, try it out and return the worse performer. I wouldn't want to return it all, go back to 11n, and wait for 6E to arrive and get stable, and it seems like the £150 is the lower bound for an AP with 802.11k support that I understand improves interoperability with the old AP (any new ones I might get in the future), I like the seamless single SSID solution too. I guess I could forgo this and get a RAX20 or something even cheaper as a placeholder, but I mean it's not a huge saving. Then there is the Zyxel AP with pretty much a complete feature set, only limited by the 2 internal antennae (the effect of this limitation is unclear to me), at an extra £50 which is fine, but if 2.5GE doesn't actually work then the appeal is diminished. Will poke around this a bit more.

 

Yes, and, you have to have QOS/WMM enabled to get connected properly and enable high speeds.

It's just something they need to remove the cap on in the next software release to enable full speed connectivity. I opened a couple of tickets with them for a few different things that weren't disclosed in marketing / specs to revise in the next release.

Pairing the AX210 and NWA210AX gives me a full 120MB/s back to storage without any hiccups though which translates to 1gbps. With the AC/AX200 I would hit a target of only ~650mbps. Essentially double the speed w/o any 160mhz trickery or DFS contention to deal with potential channel shifts needed.



Top one showing 21xx is the AX210 Laptop and the next one is my phone which on the phone actually shows a link rate of 1200x1200. Of course refreshing the stats changes dynamically as devices move around or are in a "standby" mode. You'll see different SSID's in use as mentioned before for lower priority devices like printer (.101) and thermostat (.105).

 

Thank you.I've been finally reading the duckware doc you posted earlier. Quite illuminating, a few points that stood out to me:
* The relationship between the distance and the QAM available. the new QAM1024 is only applicable at very short distances - consequently an upgrade from AC to AX would only have minor impact at a distance
* While the 160Mhz channel feature sounds cool on paper, it would almost surely not translate to a real doubling of bandwidth, given that I have no 160Mhz uncontested channel space around me.
In the high channel range, there is a radar for sure, since nothing above channel 112 works, and there isn't enough free space in the lower DFS area.
* I could leverage the 4x4 MIMO of my existing extender by either getting a USB 3x4 MIMO dongle by Asus (availability is poor and not cheap), or using another 4x4 router in bridge mode.
Edit: although in AC it would only double the downlink to the client? I don't care about that.
* The additional antennae and beamforming does matter - I have one one 5GHz channel in 2x2 mode, and one in 4x4 mode and the latter tends to show around 10% stronger signal, despite a slightly higher frequency being used
* Cheap devices often do not support all or some DFS channels, either in AP mode or at all - actually very few support them all (my top of the AC line extender doesn't)
* Antenna transmission power itself is a bit moot, since most DFS channels are power-limited

As for the Zyxel, Ok, so basically the 2.5G in doesn't currently work. That's a bummer. BTW to drill down into the antenna issue a bit more, the specs say it supports "4x4 + 2x2 MIMO embedded antenna"
https://download.zyxel.com/NWA210AX/datasheet/NWA210AX_3.pdf
I don't fully understand what that means, but it seems that only 2x2 MIMO is supported, given that it only has two antennae?

Additionally, looking at your screenshot, I am a bit concerned about device #4 connecting at 175/6. What kind of device is it, if you can reveal that roughly, and how far from the AP?

I am about halfway through the doc, I want to finish reading it before making any further moves. Generally, the recommendation is to stick with AC for now, given that most Wifi 6 routers are still draft, never mind the 6E, and the fact that to reap massive improvements from 6, most devices would have to support it (to leverage OFDMA). This kind of mirrors @Aivxtla's advice.

In summary, it's fair to say that, to be charitable, 99% of consumers have very little idea what they are doing when purchasing WiFi equipment, hence the prevalence of marketing gimmicks such as AC6000 or AX11000. Reviews by the likes of Tom's Guide are worse than useless. Their reviews should contain just one sentence: "Sorry, we don't understand this stuff at all and don't want to mislead you - please try to read this technical doc here and good luck out there, you're going to need it"

 

4x4 + 2x2 is in reference to the 4x 5Ghz Streams and 2x 2.4 Ghz streams. Likely 2x dual mode 2.4/5 Ghz antennas + 2x 5 Ghz only antennas (4 total antennas). At this point I'd forget the word MIMO (Multiple In (streams), Multiple Out) as that's practically every dual antenna or more (2x2 or greater) device on the market outside of some rare MISO (ie Chromecast 2; 2 antennas but only one of them is used for uplink) or SIMO devices. Basically categorize the multi antenna clients/APs/routers into SU-MIMO (aka regular MIMO) (SU=Single User, vast majority on the market) and MU-MIMO (MU=Multi User), which has been taking traction since the past few years. FYI you can have a single antenna device (1x1)(aka SISO) support MU-MIMO, as that single device could be paired in a grouping with one or more clients to fill up the number of streams on the AP/Router.

Hope these images help, take the speed gain with a grain of salt as distance between two client devices in an MU grouping (greater the better for MU), chipset and client used all can make a difference, this example uses 3 single antenna clients on a 4 antenna router:

 

Example: On a single 80 MHz 802.11ac channel operating at 433 Mbps:

• 1×1 MIMO yields 433 Mbps
• 2×2 MIMO yields 866 Mbps (most wireless clients are 2×2)
• 3×3 MIMO yields 1300 Mbps
• 4×4 MIMO yields 1733 Mbps (most new Wi-Fi 5 routers are 4×4)
• 8×8 MIMO yields 3466 Mbps

all on the same 80 MHz channel.




2401 Mbps speed: The 2401 Mbps maximum PHY speed is for an 80 MHz channel to an 4×4 client. However, a much more realistic maximum PHY speed is 1200 Mbps for an 80 MHz channel to a 2×2 client (840 Mbps throughput), and for a realistic distance away from the router, a PHY speed of 864 Mbps (600 Mbps throughput). 802.11ax is called "HE" for High Efficiency.

-- in actual use my AX210 >> 210AX internally hits 120MB/s = 1gbps (this sort of debunks the statement above and concurs with the QOS limit of the AP)

The technology allows a router to communicate with multiple devices at the same time, rather than broadcasting to one device, and then the next, and the next. Right now, MU-MIMO allows routers to communicate with four devices at a time. Wi-Fi 6 will allow devices to communicate with up to eight.

Wi-Fi 6 also:

• Increases the number of transmit beamforming streams to eight in order to increase network range and throughput;
• uses both the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously to greatly improve performance;
• uses 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation (1024-QAM) to increase throughput for emerging use cases (Wi-Fi 5 uses 256-QAM);
• implements individual target wake time (TWT) to improve battery life and reduce power consumption for Wi-Fi devices; and
• introduces spatial reuse technology that will allow devices to more easily access a Wi-Fi network in order to transmit data.

• 30% faster speeds will mean users are getting their content in less time;
• increased throughput will allow more simultaneous users;
• reduced latency means an increase in users won't necessarily kill speeds;
• Wi-Fi 6 APs operating in areas with high signal congestion won't be as affected by it, so users will experience a more reliable connection even in crowded environments; and
• superior outdoor service and increased range means Wi-Fi 6 networks will have fewer dead spots that interfere with both professional and customer Wi-Fi use.

5GHZ:
Ok, so for the Zyxel 210 specifically you have a 4x4:4
On the Zyxel 110 you have a 2x2:2

On the AX side a 2x2 (160mhz) will give you the 2.4gbps // On 2x2 80mhz you get 1,2gbps

2.4GHZ - across the board you'll see most offerings only doing 2x2 since it's a legacy at this point for distance vs speed

NWA210: (you can see the copy / paste in the literature conflicting with the details on the right side)

NWA110:




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2.5G port works just fine, the issue is that the QOS has a cap of 1gbps which is software controlled and the AP is using openWRT as its underlying OS. This just needs to be updated by Zyxel to allow 2.5gbps in the software configuration and was probably overlooked when they ported over the software from AP's that only have 1GE ports for uplink.

-------------------------------------------------------

160mhz / 80+80mhz - it will work if you fine tune the channels and 80+80 is more likely to work since it avoids using DFS channels completely. I've had it working on devices and tested out at line speed @ 1GE because that was the ultimate bottleneck of the physical port instead of the 1.733gbps it provided.

-------------------------------------------------------

Device #4 is my TV which I mentioned before being an issue @ 173m vs the physical port at 100m

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Thanks, will do a detailed pass in the evening. As for the 2.5GE issue: this being presumably a software issue would leave hope for a resolution, but either way the bandwidth is capped at the moment. I don't have any experience with Zyxel - have they firmly committed to resolving this, with an ETA? Are we sure that the underlying CPU is fast enough to handle QoS at 2.5Gbps? They could I theory be telling customers it's software, whereas it's something more serious.

 

You likely don't need QoS if you have like a 200-300 Mbps connection unless you are constantly saturating your bandwidth, not that likely on home use unless you have constant heavy uploads or torrents going on. More important upload side as usually cable internet is usually pretty lopsided like mine where I get 1.1-1.2 Gbps for downlink but only 35-50 Mbps for upload.

I set QoS only on the upload (I use a separate firewall with pFsense installed) side due to the above mentioned situation, well in my case I set limiters. If you theoretically were to try to do QoS on a 1-2 gbps symetrical connection I very highly doubt the current Qualcomm or even Broadcom chipsets would provide you your full bandwidth, granted there is a separate dual core packet processing co-processor in addition to the main Qualcomm IPQ8074 CPU that helps with offloading even with QoS enabled, not sure its that powerful though.

You'd probably want to build or buy an x86 Intel/AMD system and run pFsense or Linux firewall/Router software to get QoS done well at those Gig+ speeds.

 

I think it can handle the QOS issue.

As to the modification of the OS.... I pointed it out and they're sending it to engineering for review. Considering they have released 4 software versions since inception it's highly likely there will be another release in the near term. They of course like most businesses won't give you a firm ETA on things like a modification since it's not a "bug" per se but a performance issue.

Zyxel isn't saying anything about anything.... I'm pointing out the flaw to them in their configuration and limitation. I dug through the bits and bytes to find the limitation and spotted the issue in the output.

Most devices at this point probably have similar issues that hobble their performance until people point out specific limitations that result in "firmware" updates to resolve them. If people don't report the issues though then companies don't have incentive to make the changes.

QOS / WMM is REQUIRED to make anything beyond 802.11N to work. Whether you need it or not for specific applications like VOIP it's a piece of the configuration that enables the faster speeds. It's part of the networking stack that is needed for compliance to enable features / functions.

When settings up a PCIE AP the underlying software to control the physical hardware requires it to be in the file used to bring up the AP with speeds exceeding 130mbps.

 

Exactly, surprised to learn QoS is required . The duckware doc claims:

Do NOT touch 'Enable WMM': "Enable WMM" is ON by default on ALL routers, because it is actually needed for any speed past 54 Mbps. Turn if off if you want to see what I mean.

Yeah, building own AP would be another option, but frankly that would be a bit too time consuming for me at the moment. Surely, there must be a fitting and robust product on the market which operates to specs

Presumably this was taken while the AP was under its current ceiling 1Gbps load?

Yeah this does sound encouraging, but still I'm astonished that an OEM releases a product whereby one of the key features is crippled in this manner...

@Aivxtla did you experience anything like this with the 5GE port on your RAX120?

OK, so this is another feature of Zyxel by the sound of it, or you concurring with the duckware doc in that this applies to every AP/router? I mean many APs don't have QoS at all, mine included.

BTW Are you the author of that doc BTW?

 

Good site, only issue I had with the Duckware guy is that a year or two ago he was arguing that we couldn't get more than I think 50% of the link rate in real world testing if I recall correctly which some of us disputed on Netgear forums. Seems he made changes looking now.

Pretty sure this AP side QoS is not like what you'd have on the router.

 

I'm not the author and I'm just telling you how things work.

In the past I've managed WIFI for 100's of sites. Mostly working with Cisco though as it's all standardized for management by CLI and older / SMB models by GUI.

Experience on my own equipment and in the field have proven or exposed flaws within systems to be addressed by OEM's.

Well, it is the only aspect of the AP that pins down to exactly 1GE limitation to the bit. There's no other reason from a PHY standpoint for a bottleneck to 1gbps. All of the physical pieces can exceed 1gbps so the software qos cap is the only thing I could find a 1gbps limitation being invoked across the network. I have 2 gbps to the modem, 5gbps from the "router" to the AP / 2.5gbps hardcoded in the AP, and a LR exceeding 2gbps from the AX210 wifi card.

Looking through the tech dump from the AP itself is how I found the limiting in the first place. I double checked all of the chips to make sure it wasn't any limitation there. The entanglement of systems running behind the curtain on these things in general can make it more complicated than it needs to be but, the system is running openWRT / hostapd on the backend to bring up the AP and transmit data.

Normally when you setup your own AP based on the WIFI card you simply let WMM mark the traffic and don't assign any limits but the QOS mechanism is indeed imposing a limit on the NWA.


https://www.gbmb.org/gbps-to-mbs

 

Techjunky that merely just looks like they gave more fine control over default WMM options commonly on used on the WiFi side of all routers/AP rather than the traffic shaping/QoS/Codel stuff normally done on the router/firewall side that @etern4l is likely thinking about, not exactly the same thing as far as I know with what little knowledge I have. @downloads or someone with more knowledge wanna chime in?

 

NWA210AX:


hostapd configuration


So, the WMM configuration between BYOR and Zyxel offer the same QOS setups because they're built using the same backend however in the hostapd raw configuration there's no hard coded rate limit. In the Zyxel though there's a static limit assigned to all of the queues of 1GE.

Your average router from pick a vendor doesn't have the same capabilities end to end exceeding 1GE so it doesn't really become noticeable if you're trying to push a single thread over 1GE because you don't have the bandwidth to go beyond it anyway.

 

Thanks. OK, I understand a single antenna client device could support 1x1 MU-MIMO, but from the AP perspective, the number of antennas is directly related to the number of spatial streams, right?

It gets more confusing though, because I saw this USB 3T4R AC dongle:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-90IG0230-AC1900-Wi-Fi-Adapter/dp/B01GZ1XRTS
It has "dual 3-position external antennas". Presumably, 3-position just refers to the ability to position the antenna differently for optimal transmission.
it would follow that somehow this "dual-antenna" design is somehow capable of achieving 3x4:3. I wonder how. Either the antennas are partitioned, or - more likely I guess - 2 additional internal antennas are involved. Alternatively "dual-antenna" refers to either dual band or dual modes (e.g. 3x4 and 2x2), as per this Zyxel AP, where they are talking about "dual antenna 4x4 +2x2...

Thanks. Just one thing to clarify:

" uses both the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously to greatly improve performance;"


Jerry of Duckware has this to say on the 2.4Ghz operation of WiFi 6:

"Bands: Technically, 802.11ax does also operate in 2.4 GHz, but since there are NO 80 MHz channel there, most people (especially home installations) will stay in 5 GHz. It has been said that 802.11ax is in 2.4 GHz mainly for the benefit of IoT device support, but it remains to be seen if that will happen at all -- as most low power IoT devices stuck with Wi-Fi 4 and never even implemented Wi-Fi 5"

Is that right? Is the 2.4GHz operation baked into the 600mbps SS bandwidth for AX, or is that purely based on the 5GHz operation, and if AX was also able to use a 2.4GHz channel worked in parallel, the effective bandwidth would increase further?

.

 

OK, so I presume you tried to disable WMM in that dropdown (although I can see why it would be quite undesirable to do so longer term). What exactly happened then? Your AP dropped to .11n or lower?

 

Even on 20Mhz performance of AX on 2.4 Ghz roughly doubles over the old N standard. Remember AC standard was only for 5 Ghz, so on AC/WiFi-5 routers 2.4 ghz was still N. On 5Ghz the AC to AX jump is far less stark at roughly 5-10% in most cases with maybe around 15-20% or so gain in best case real realworld conditions.

As for 3T4R just means it has 4 antennas with all 4 used for receive and any 3 of the 4 at a given time used for transmit.

 

If you disable WMM on most routers it will drop to 54 mbps link rate, ie 802.11g levels. It is a requirement for n, ac, ax modes if I recall.

 

@etern4l
The 2.4ghz band at this point is for legacy devices and distance for its ability to penetrate walls better than a 5ghz signal

@ Aivxtla
When WMM is disabled with my optimized settings on the AX210 card it just simply doesn't connect until I reboot it. If I default the settings on the AX210 it would probably connect at the slower rate until the AP is reconfigured to enable WMM again.

 

"
Wi-Fi 6 also:

• Increases the number of transmit beamforming streams to eight in order to increase network range and throughput;
• uses both the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously to greatly improve performance;"

OK, so the statement you posted above was a bit inaccurate - it doesn't really use 2.4GHz band concurrently with 5Ghz (for an extra 300-600Mbps I guess).

Close to pulling the trigger on the Zyxel, but this bandwidth cap is holding me back - the question is: will I be able to find a better alternative within the budget? Probably not, but will take a last look.

 

BTW The new 6E routers will all have to be tri-band, therefore significantly more expensive, right?

 

No, it's supply and demand 101.

 

OK, actually it's not so much about supply and demand, but perhaps 2.4, 5 & 6 GHz won't require additional antennas, as opposed the current tri-band APs running in 2.4, 5, 5 setup.

BTW I found out that some NASes, mine included, suffer from the exact same QoS nonsense your Zyxel AP does, i.e. they limit single-client bandwidth to 1Gbps.... unbelievable. So at present for me the payoff on any ultra-fast WiFi like 2.4GBps using 160Hz channel is close to nil. Consumer/SMB level devices fail.

 

Not sure on the antenna aspect, most antennas in laptops, routers etc are dual mode. 2.4/5 Ghz. If an antenna isn't properly tuned for 6 Ghz perfomance could take a dive and worse power use wise I'm guessing, lower 6Ghz channels are closer to the 5Ghz range so they may not be as badly impacted with older antennas in those channels. If someone could test we would have a definitive answer. I will be getting an AXE router soon for eval but can't post results due to NDA so it might be 6-8 weeks before I can give a definitive answer with with benchmarks, outside of just a Yes/No. I'm gonna be testing my Dell Latitude 7280 and 7450 with AX210s I ordered off Newegg and Amazon, find out soon enough if the antennas are good enough or if I need to use the new ones that came with the cards. Thinking of getting a third for my Precision 7520 as well.

 

Antenna technology doesn't change enough to make a difference between bands. When you're moving from 800mhz to gig+ it will make a difference but the technology for laptops / computers / unlicensed spectrum doesn't really change all that much to keep the ability to shovel new products out the door and make more $.

Any antenna from the past 10 years works just fine whether you're talking client or router. The chipset that mitigates interference makes more of an impact than a passive antenna ever will.

The only antennae aspect that could potentially make a difference is the surface space to catch the signals coming at it or ability to make it external to any laptop housing as to not reduce it's ability to pick up signals with the housing obstructions. For instance for TV I have a couple of flat panel antennae one to the TV and one to the DVR card and one's rated for 30 miles and the other 15 or 10. Either way the smaller one is 1/4 of the size of the bigger one and they both perform the same and pick up the same signals form the towers.



Now, if I move them less than 2 feet into the windows where LOS would be better they perform worse. They're not directional but they perform better on the wall than anywhere else. I typically get 90-100% signal form their placement unless there's interference from weather or obstructions but generally they're not affected.

I've picked up similar but smaller antenna tabs you would use in a laptop / desktop with a AX210 or otherwise and simply putting them inside the case instead of routing them to an external portion kills the distance in which they pick up a signal. My laptop can pick up signals from over a block away and normal external antennae will as well on the PC. Now, if I put my larger rubber ducky antennae on the desktop side my 1 block radius kicks back in. Even with shorter "normal" wifi antennae I get signals within a 1/4 block of me.

I guess what I'm saying is.... Placement is more important than "technology" as they're all different antennae that I'm using and depending on the obstruction determines the distance in which you are able to pull in signals and use the spectrum.

That sucks... Kind of reinforces my statements though about not going off the shelf anymore with this stuff if you want the performance don't leave it in the vendor's hands or at least not your $$$$.

What kind go NAS is it?

 

I initially thought the same and I hope you're right. A quick search online however shows there could be an impact if not attuned to target frequencies, granted I was looking at 5Ghz on a "2.4Ghz only" antenna:

Here's one discussion, The guy 5th post down ( socal87) seems to have some experience:
https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=77616&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

6Ghz is not too far off from the tail end of the current 2.4/5Ghz dual mode antennas optimal range so impact may not be too bad especially close to the lower end of 6Ghz.

Guess it's a good question for sxf2000 on SNB forums, he worked on WiFi chips for Qualcomm I believe.

 

https://www.ti.com/lit/ml/slap127/slap127.pdf?ts=1610560734110

https://www.skyworksinc.com/-/media/SkyWorks/Documents/Articles/IWPC_062019.pdf

For the stuff we're dealing with.... it's not really something that will be a groundbreaking change in how cheap OEM's will innovate the RF spread. It's not broken and they're not going to be putting money into it unless someone finds a better way to reinvent the sail that catches the signals.

Back in the day OEM's used 3-wire antennae in laptops but, as chips switched to a streamlines 2-wire design the OEM got to save $0.01/unit and didn't look back. IIRC there were some one offs that had a 4-wire setup as well.

Kind of hard to really say how much deviation a 6E over 6 configuration will ultimately have but, someone will eventually try to sell you a $20 antenna with a different sticker than the $5 version and tons of people will buy them. Amazon reviews are amusing when new tech gets unleashed and grandma upgrades her tech stuff.

From the RF side in Cell spectrum is not as omni directional as more focused and diffused per antenna. There's a reason you see a cell setup with 3 antennae in each section of a triangle totaling 9 antennae per setup.

The best way to deal with antennae is to not over think it unless your job is to over think it. The market place will tell you when something better comes along and when it's a dud that's been repackaged for profit.

 

Nothing special, Synology 918+. Information from Synology forums, since I don't have a link-aggregating switch.

My remaining problem is that PHY drops off to about 500mbs across a wall. My understanding it that there are only two angles of attack, since 6 will do little here (+10%?):
1. Get a 4x4 1733 AP - these can be had for less than a price of some network cards, e.g. Netgear WAC124 or something like that, bridge it, and connect the remote device vie 1GE. Not a very portable solution though.
1b. Get some weird 3x4 USB AC adapter - actually more expensive and would support only one device. More compact I guess.
2. Try to get 160MHz to work - not an amazing proposition in Europe, since the upper DFS channels are restricted. Basically the highest that works for me is 112. So the only option is to use the 36-64 range, half of which is congested as hell, so basically I don't think that's worth a bother at all.

Frankly tempted to just stop here for now, until 6E arrives in anger.

 

Synology gets good praises usually and they'll sell you a 10GE card for it.

I tried their RT-2600AC router when I was chasing AC Wave 2 1733 and I couldn't get it to sync up at that rate and sent it back for an R7800 from Netgear which would give me line speed on a gbps plan but capped at 1GE ports.

LAG won't always get you more than 1 port in bandwidth but it will give you redundancy. It depends on the mechanism that's invoked by turning it on as there are 4 different options / modes you can use it.

 

I can't really speak to the EU deployments but I'll take your word on the congestion.

6E might be worth the wait in your case but, upgrading your clients to AX210's might be enough improvement until then. It's a cheap option for the time being at $25/client for the cards.

I've been upgrading steadily since the 7xxx series cards and the 210's provide a more consistent experience IMO. Even switching from the AX200 to the AX210 has been a perceivable difference in how the data flows. While I don't have anything that pushed on the 6ghz spectrum yet the improvement on 5ghz is enough for now. Just a simple networked file move from one folder to another which shouldn't be a delay since it's on the same system but from a remote client there was a stutter in the client showing it moved vs on the 210 it's not there any longer.

The fact that the other big OEM chips aren't selling 6/6E isn't a big deal unless you're running something that doesn't play well with Intel like a Mac OS. I would just start out with 1 AX210 and try it out to see if things get better. if they do then order more, if not then return it and wait for 6E.

Since you have the time it might be worth considering building your own NAS to overcome the limitations of Synology and every other NAS on the market for that matter. They charge way too much for those cheap setups. No reason to pay $300+ for 2 bays and a cheap CPU/RAM configuration. Pick up a cheap desktop PC on ebay and reconfigure it to be a NAS...either keep the chassis or pull the guts from it and put it into a different case for more drives and better ventilation. If you wan to go all out and build from scratch you'll have more options but it will get pricey depending on how you want to spec it out and whether you want to implement more than just storage (which makes more sense if you need it).

 

I personally haven't seen any gains with the AX210 over the AX200 in repeat testing with the RAX120/80 and XR1000 (aka RAX50) using the two Latitude laptops mentioned previously. And testing in AC mode I can add in the 9260AC and say all three perform identically within margin of error. Maybe newer driver updates since you upgraded can account for the differences.

 

I don't think this mid-range model has any extension slots, unfortunately. Basically, it's very hard to breach the 1Gbps/client barrier - even a commercial AP can let you down. Quite strange. You'd think companies would use things like higher real transfer speeds to drive sales. I guess they figured tricks like "AX11000" or "AC6000" work well enough

Good point, but no switch support is needed in this case - the NAS supports Linux interface bonding for redundancy and LB. There is no overhead, in fact it's a bit faster in a single client benchmark (I guess it pushes other traffic to the second link, so more is left for the heavy client), and the two links can connect to different switches. Done.

Now just need to think whether to keep this ex8000 tri band extender or exchange it for something. Obviously I use it in AP mode, but the first 5GHz 2x2 band which is normally the only 5Ghz radio available to clients in extender mode is pretty useless. First of all, it can only be configured for channels 36-64. If I pick the congested non-DFS space there, the performance (at 25ft) is abysmal - if I pick a completely free spot in the higher channels, the performance is less than half of what the 4x4 radio achieves. Even at short range, the 2x2 radio syncs at 866 but real performance is ca. 30% lower than that of the 4x4 radio at 866. The client is 2x2 wave2 so I guess that's beamforming / diversity of the 4x4 radio in action. Switching the low-channel 2x2 5GHz radio off doesn't affect the 1733 radio performance in the slightest. The Duckware guy is right on the money in saying that 4x4 is absolutely worth it.

The other thing that still keeps me interested in the EX8000 is the 802.11k smart roaming support - the only other router/AP I've seen explicitly supporting this is your Zyxel, which separately still puzzles me over how they can say it has dual antennas and supports 4x4 - shouldn't they say quadruple antenna, or does dual refer to dual band? The immediate utility of the upgrade to Zyxel (given the rest of my infrastructure) would be minimal though. 10, maybe 20MB/s faster transfer at short range and probably next to nothing at the all-relevant 25ft, where only a 4x4 client/bridge is likely to significantly help. Conversely, the loss of the other 2x2 5Ghz backup radio could also have a negative effect occasionally. Probably best to stop wasting time on this - seems that the cumulative time spent on this WiFi research has far exceeded the effects of future WiFi slowdowns for the next decade It was still fun though!

 

My most sophisticated clients at the moment are Intel AC1550 2x2 Wave2 160Hz 1733. I would need a 6 AP to see any improvement from AX210. I guess the only reason to get AX210 over AX200 would be future proofing, since performance should be the same using a 6 router, or am I missing something?

The thing is, I don't really have the time for this, spent far too much of it already - the motivation was to figure out an upgrade path to 2Gbps transfers to the NAS - now I know that's likely impossible without upgrading the NAS or building a cusotm one....
Think I will just see how it goes for now.

 

2GE to the NAS is possible through a cable / switch setup. It depends on the clients though on how you approach it. Since you don't have an expansion slot on the 918+ the LAG / Bundle has to hit a switch or a PC w/ dual ports to take advantage of it.

The downside to the 2.5gbps switch is that it's unmanaged and wouldn't allow a LAG setup. You would need a managed switch to bump the combined ports off the NAS to get the throughput gain. To get above 1GE though you'd have to run 2 client sessions to get it to kick in on the 2nd link due to the method Synology uses to do LAG.

A full 125MB/s though is a nice upgrade from your existing setup. If you go down the path prescribed and then leap to 6E when it's a bit more common or Zyxel updates the 1gbps cap on QOS it would be a bit more immediate and long lasting impact.

Seeing as though the 918+ is a 4-bay that's convertible into a PC case a bit easier than if it was more drives. The $ you would spend upgrading the chassis / network functionality would be more prudent to convert to a PC NAS where you have more options down the road. If you're doing the migration it's a good time to think about the drives if you're running over 50% utilization.

There's a 2-port 2.5GE card that's available for about $45 and I would opt for 2 of those //or// the 5 port 2.5GE switch.
1-AP
1-Router
3-ports to LAN devices / AP's depending on how you want to setup things //or// add router functionality to the new PC/NAS which is where the 2nd card comes into play

https://www.techhive.com/article/3564821/how-to-make-your-home-network-faster.html

Doing a homebrew router isn't that difficult and since there aren't any PCIe cards supporting 6/6E it takes out the complication of setting up hostapd for an AP and sourcing a viable chipset other than Intel.

But, as you said you don't have the time for this sort of thing right now....

 

Yeah, good point. Going from 80MB/s to 125MB/s would be a decent upgrade, although nowhere near the quantum leap from 11n to ac, but really don't have time for the DIY route. Would need to grab your Zyxel and a switch - will take a look over the weeknd. I don't want to lose the long range performance though, which evidently is the forte of the EX8000. If the Zyxel has 4 antennas and supports beam forming well, it should match it. Otherwise would just return it.

 

It's all about environment. Try it out for a couple of weeks and see how it works, if you don't like it then return it. You'll get good coverage if you're not living in a granite cave or something where the signal can't penetrate the walls. N >> AC was dramatic in comparison but the potential is there to double it if the cap is lifted in the next revision of the software.

I don't buy into the hype of marketing from any company when it comes to WIFI and base things on experience.

 

BTW guys what about jumbo frames? Do you use them? Does the Zyxel AX210 AP support them?

 

For them to show any effect you need saturation. 5-10 clients probably won't get you there. In networks I've worked on the only time I see them in use is 10GE+ solutions.

 

That's counter-intuitive. Should work at any physical transport speed, it just means that the header is smaller relative to the payload, increasing efficiency and throughput but also latency. On the flipside, any retransmissions are costly, so probably not the best solution for mobile networks. Doesn't work with my setup anyway, not even over Ethernet: enabled on the NAS - fine, enabled on the NIC - np, enabled in Windows - fail.

Edit: nm - the difference is 116MB/s max throughput over 1GE vs 123MB/s with 9k jumbo frames.

 

I’ve never really bothered with it because as far as I knew the Netgear routers I had generally didn’t support it. Maybe the one I have now does not sure.

 

Itching to pull the trigger on something to play around with AX over the weekend. None of the products fully satisfy me. I can see why people may be wanting to build their own routers/APs.

Does your RAX120 suffer from the 1Gbps per client QoS limit when using the 5Gbps port?
Also, do you know if it supports 802.11k or v? Nothing in the documentation, other than the extenders "work better with Netgear routers" - not clear why.

Another option is the Asus RT-AX86U - 2.5G and link aggregation which doesn't work in AP mode lol. Not certified, but AC86U and AX88U are. It has some AIMesh support (?), and simple "assisted roaming" whereby it drops connections under a threshold strength. Not sure.

Also struggling with switches - pushed that out to a separate thread.

I also have a few specific questions about Zyxel - moved that to another thread too. Many thanks for your help guys.

Totally seeing why people would want to build their own network equipment, given the market offerings

 

BYOR = cost savings when you have specific ideas in mind that aren't encompassed in "consumer" equipment but can be found in enterprise equipment.

I could design a BYOR to fit smaller offices where port density isn't needed and can be offloaded to a combination of WIFI/wired. When you need more port density it becomes more cost effective to use more switches and uplink but BYOR can still handle multiple switches to aggregate them into different cards. It becomes a layout / design challenge deciding on your bandwidth / uplink requirements but also your WAN/ISP speeds.

It also depends on the "support" side as well when you have some custom setup not everyone you hire for support will know how to address issues when you're not using common equipment. If something fails and you don't have parts on stock somewhere for quick deployment it becomes an issue for downtime / recovery. This is where the Cisco's come into play vs a custom setup or an off brand.