There is a tendency to assume that an access point is an access point. At best it might N or AC compliant rather than just A/B/G. You might see the words MIMO on the box as well but no one is quite sure what this means or how it works.
We know for a fact that this is not the case. Take a recent customer situated in a high density location – lots of people and lots of access points. He had recent installed a nice new fibre connection which was running really well – more than 50 mbit/s via a wired connection but a not so impressive 6 mbit/s via wireless on his consumer grade router.
There are two ways to improve wireless performance in the most general sense of working with most client devices. The first is to find “clear air”in the most commonly used 2.4 Ghz spectrum, say choose channel 9 rather than the default 1 or 11 (huge hint, don’t use “auto” in the settings as if another router has “auto” channel set as well (which is really likely in a congested area) you’ll end up playing channel tag to no useful effect. The second way to find “”clear air” is to move to the 5Ghz band if your AP supports it. Most basic models do not. And most client devices older than 2-3 years don’t either. But if you can use it, do so. The air is clearer and you get to use 80 Mhz channels as well in AC mode – this is like using a 4 lane motorway rather than a dual carriageway.
Basic routers are also not over endowed with
- Good antennae
- Powerful processors with lots of RAM.
So let’s take an example..
- Standard basic home router – 8 MB Ram, 220 Mhz processor, 1-2 Dbi antennae.
- Mid range router – 128 Mb Ram, 2 x 700 Mhz processor, 4-6 Dbi antennae.
When we moved the client from router 1 to router 2 his wireless performance went from 6 mbit/s to 46 mbit/s.
£120 price difference for eight times the performance. Is this the performance you are after? Give our Technical Sales team a call on 0345 450 9393 opt 1.
