802.11ax Routers

I have discussed this a lot in the wireless forums. Most people have in common, that only happens under certain conditions that are almost "lab-level". Nowadays anything beyond 600Mb/s stable over wifi is utopia. So I believe that anything beyond 1GbE WAN port is useless. If it had some adittional 2.5GbE LAN ports, it would be an entirely different thing.

If i had 3 1GbE LAN clients (not wlan) wouldn't that potential 1300Mbps be shared between all 3 ?

So if im downloading a game on my Xbox, PS5 and PC at the same time I could make use of that extra 100-300mbps allowed by the 2.5GbE WAN port ?

The problem is that you are not going to pick that bandwidth. The potential in the datasheets go over 2Gb in numerous instances like RT3200 but that is utterly false. As you see in other posts, most people are struggling to get over 500 Mb/s just in front of the router.

It could make sense to have a WAN 2.5Gb for many 1GbE ethernet connected ports and maybe, it could make sense if you are switching between a WLAN and Ethernet with such 2.5GbE WAN. So technically the 2.5GbE is an useless thing (for me wonderful because all my switches are 2.5GbE and all my cables are CAT6A so I have plenty of room for this affairs), but still I don't think it would be edgy enough. Still I find Dynalink a great deal.

But this raw power is not of my high concern, and I doubt it would be of any concerns unless you have like many 4K streaming stations at the same time. For games, latency won't be affected by such big uplinks.

If I had the money I would like to do a real comparison between Dynalink and Xiaomi AX3600 signal wise. This it what it worries me the most, because I need to cover a client that is in a weird position (a Ring doorbell) and I can only pick it with -70dB which makes the quality of the communication somewhat terrible. If I could reduce it to somewhere around -65dB I would be happy.

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The signal from routers with higher gain antennas (e.g., 6 dB plus) more common on external antenna routers emits in a shape more like a disc or doughnut on a plane perpendicular to the antenna axis, and the signal from routers with lower dB antennas (e.g., 3 dB) more common on internal antenna routers emits in a shape more like a sphere surrounding the antenna. A disc can give better horizontal range but is more likely to leave dead spots above and below, and a sphere can be better for more complete coverage, e.g., using one access point to cover an entire building from a central location, but with the radio power spread out more.

An external antenna router with short low gain antennas may perform much like an internal antenna router. In either case, not necessarily better or worse. It depends on what antennas are on the router of course, and whether a doughnut or a sphere is better for an application.

Something else to consider is that antennas can interfere with each other if not separated by a wavelength (~6 cm for 5 GHz and ~12.5cm for 2.4 GHz). Might explain why all-in-one internal antenna units are getting bigger and bigger.

If you have removable antennas on an external antenna AP, you could try higher gain replacement antennas oriented perpendicular to your doorbell. Might work, might not. But replacement antennas are cheap, so little cost to try.

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I will have both the Dynalink and the AX3600 by the end of the week, tell em what you want me to compare

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If you can just plug both to a the same switch and put them nearby, then connect an smartphone with iperf3 client (Ping Tools for example for Android)

Then from the computer, connected through LAN and with an iperf server check the speed of both devices. You can put the smartphone in different places for this, like 5 meters away, two rooms away, etc...

If you could do this from the 2.4 and the 5Ghz bands then it will be incredible. If you plan to flash with OpenWRT both routers The ideal would be setting 2.4Ghz to 20Hz HT and the 5Ghz to 80Hz HT in both routers to compare in equal conditions. This will be the definitive test. You can open a specific thread for this. I'm sure a lot of people will be amazed to see the results. AX3600 is probably the most hyped router of the history of this forum according to the stats (despite RT3200 is nowadays the most recommended)

Yeah the AX3600 is a bit over hyped especially with the Dynalink now, but i got my AX3600 for like £80 in 2020 and it was for a long time one of the only retail IPQ807X devices that was A) affordable and B) used the V2 SoC supported by ath11k (and thus was the main focus for IPQ807X bringup)

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The thing here is that I feel that the internal antennas have never been a great thing. Comparatively through my experience all my external antennas devices including the shitty WR841NDv14 I recently buy perform way decently. But this kind of impressions are subjective, and there is nothing better than doing some iperf3 tests and see how they perform. I've been also tempted to buy both devices, flash them and return the worst.

Looks like blocktrron is trying to bring support for the ASUS TUF-AX4200. Seems to have a Filogic 880 CPU.

https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/staging/blocktrron.git;a=commit;h=776dff2206877d5460821f6445455f313bf5608d

It's going for around 115€ in the EU.

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For what it is worth: I use two AX3600 as AP's (x86 as router) and they are great in that usage scenario.
They replaced C7's and I was able to go from 3 to 2 AP's as subjective 5GHz coverage is better with AX3600 than C7. My mobile devices are 2x2 AX anyway, so 1Gbit is just enough (I top out around 800Mbit/sec iperf3 in iphone 13).

Whether they perform well as routers, I do not know.

With its external antennas, this looks like it could be an interesting option for adding a dumb-ap/mesh-node to an existing RT3200/E8450.

I see that installing OpenWRT on these requires access to the serial port ... which seems to require access to the bottom of the motherboard.

Have you put OpenWRT on your RG-E5? If so, what did the process involve to get access to the serial port? Basically, I can see that you'd have to open the case and unscrew the motherboard ... did you have to unplug/unsolder the antenna cables?

No, I haven't, yet.

Can be done with the soldered ones attached, you just flip the PCB.

but those are USD 140+ devices

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The Reyee is way cheaper than the Ruijie, it starts around $45 on US ebay, for open boxes.

(adjusted my initial post about the two, now the model names are correct)

I have both Belkin RT3200 and Dynalink DL-WRX36. I can connect to my 2.4GHz SSID about 100 metres away from the devices.
Both of them support 160 MHz HT as well.
Oh, and I live in Kenya. I imported the devices from the US.

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Both are more or less the same in the format. I was looking to compare with external antennas ones, which feel more differently. I know that internal antennas could perform somewhat fine, but generally, you must compare under identical conditions but different devices.

How many other wireless networks are visible to you?

No wonder I couldn't find AX53U in Japan, after you mentioned the RT-AX1800U then I saw it right there....is this one good?

I'm using two Xiaomi Redmi AX6000's in a WDS server-client setup and can get 915 Mb/s through three concrete block walls at about 15m. When I put them side-by-side for testing I can get about 1.2 GB/s, of course that's with iperf running on the routers to bypass the gigabit ports (the internal switch is 2.5GBe), so the bottleneck could still be the SoC and not the WiFi.

My point here is to refute the assertions made in this thread that gigabit WiFi is a myth: it's not, your equipment is just too slow.

Nice points. But there are many factors here involved. You are running this router to router on ideal conditions to get +1Gb connection. But as soon as you start introducing more devices things start going more slowly mainly because of the main algorithms involved in the process of muxing and demuxing the packets. I always run iperf3 from phone to computer. This the only way to rest assured that things are going to be pretty much in a real environment.