Netgear WAX202 WiFi 6 $30 at Amazon

Is a WAX202B the same as WAX202 without the "B"?
I just picked up one at Office Depot and in says WAX202B on the box.
however, the Netgear site only shows WAX202.

They’re exactly the same. The sticker on the device itself makes no mention of a B model, nor does the stock firmware, and mine flashed to OpenWrt without issue.

I think it’s just to distinguish the boxes sold on store shelves, that have all the pictures and info, and the plain brown boxes sold by Amazon (and probably other sources).

After investigation, using the stock firmware, I'm quite more sure that the trouble is the (lack of external) antenna:

It has less SNR also using wifi AC.

I've ordered a TP-Link Archer AX55 (yes it will never be supported by OpenWrt), because it was on amazon (Italy) for 80€, less than the WAX202, and it has 4 nice external antennas, just to understand if the issue is the ax protocol or the WAX202.

(But I can confirm that the speed of the WAX202 from the iPad and iPhone near it, is far more superior than the ac, I can easily go to 650/700mpbs, compared to 550/600 of the ac, so consider the "Long range issue" if you want to buy it)

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Are your Ipad and Iphone AX compatible by the way?

Yes, but from the MacBook Air (wifi ax) from my desk I get better speed from the R7800 with ac. Ax is faster near the router, but it degrades also fast with the distance.

I’m just curious to understand if the range issue is a router issue, due to the lack of external antennas, or is a behavior of the ax protocol, because to me looks weird to have also bad performance from the same place using Wi-Fi ac (with wax202).

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Regarding antennas:

Netgear R7800 X4S: Official documentation does not include specs about antenna. Found this thread though, in which people speculate it might be some with 3-5 dBi

Netgear WAX202: Official documentation says:
2.4 GHz: 1,5 dBi
5 GHz: 3,5 dBi

Nevertheless, having antennas with high dBi can also lead to higher noise and may not necessarily improve connection speed or latency.

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Found this reddit thread:

# Bought a $29 WAX202 - was getting high ping when doing speed tests (QoS was the issue)

[WiFi](https://www.reddit.com/r/NETGEAR/search?q=flair_name%3A%22WiFi%22&restrict_sr=1)

We have gigabit fiber and have the desktops on ethernet, but the .ac wireless in our AT&T-supplied gateway has been getting super flaky lately so I picked up the WAX202 to add some WiFi 6.

It feels snappy (I get like 400-500 Mbps which is fine) in normal use, but when I would run a speed test it would have bad ping, especially on the upload test - like 500-1000 ms.

Turns out the default QoS was throttling the laptops and phones but as soon as I switched them from "laptop" and "phone" to "desktop" - the ping went back to normal/super-low.

Hope that helps any one who bought one of these!

Maybe configuring QoS (or disabling?) would have prevented the wax to disconnect sproradically. You speak of your devices having to go through 2 walls...

I personally have the same problem.
In my experience, regardless of distance:

0 wall = perfect
1 wall = ok
2 walls = bad
3 walls = very terrible;

Of course with higher distance the problems intensify..

@ThiloteE about the antennas, indeed on the R7800 I get the best scores at 18/20dbm (instead of the 24 by default) but if I lower the power to the WAX202 I have worse performance.

About the latency issue: I’m using it as AP only, wired to a nanoPi R4S, so in AP mode doesn’t have QoS service.

But if you want and you tell me the commands/buffer to test, I can make a iperf2/3 test, I’m curious too. For my test the ax latency is lesser but only near the AP.

Unfortunately I am not versed in the art of measuring with iperf2/3

I tested the Tplink ax3000 with external antennas.

Same behavior as the WAX202: maybe from my desk the speed are inferior to the wax202. At 6/7 meteres and one wall, I’m unable to go above 350/400mbps VS 500/550mbps of the R7800.

1/2 meters from the router the speed are superior: above 700/750mbps for the ax and about 600/650mbps for the ac/R7800. To be honest, near the router the tplink is faster than the wax202, some iperf test reported speed above 800mbps!

In the end I think the bottleneck is the ax protocol, not the wax202.

The final proof should be testing something like the Netgear RAX120/200 that is an ax router of the same price range as the R7800 was for the ac.

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Tplink ax3000 uses a different chip for wifi (and is different altogether), so we are comparing red apples with yellow apples. You are right, both use the same protocol, so the problem could in fact be the protocol, but at the same time the problem could also be that the hardware of both routers is not completely optimized to work with the ax protocol.

Although 802.11ax had been in the pipeline for almost a decade, "The IEEE 802.11ax standard was [only] finalised on September 1, 2020 when Draft 8 received 95% approval in the sponsor ballot and received final approval from the IEEE Standards Board on February 1, 2021" - Source. This statement is based on information from the IEEE working group project timelines website

ax3000 uses the Intel Lantiq WAV654A0 chip for wifi, which was released in 2019.
wax202 uses the Mediatek MT7915D DBDC, which was released in Q1 2020.

Both therefore are early adopter devices.

We could speculate that these chipsets may not have initially been designed explicitly for wifi 6, but I have no proof. What we can infer though is, that there propably was not a lot of time to test the protocol on this hardware. Moreover, the drivers are not yet quite mature too. For comparison: It took 4 years until explicit updates for my wifi card on my Aspire E13 (from 2014) stopped being provided to the linux kernel.

Just recently i saw that Uplink Mu-Mimo was deactivated for mt7915 in the newest linux kernel, which would proof this point, as with this change, mt7915 officially is not completely compliant with 802.11ax anymore (hopefully it will be more stable with this update). There are still many updates to the driver as you can see here and here

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Yes I bought the tplink because of this: they have different hardware. In order to test if the issue is the wax202 or the ax protocol, and the results are the same with different chips and different antennas: long range poor performance. So at the moment, at least in the midrange routers, the ax protocol performance decades quite fast with the distance in my (little) test.

I’ll keep the R7800, maybe I’ll try an ax device from the high-end range.

From my bathroom I’m able to connect to the R7800 at 30/40mbps but from the ax router I have 3/4mbps or I’m unable to connect. Just few walls away (on the 5GHz band).

In order to use ax routers I would prefer a mesh system, but then again the latencies increase. So there’re no benefits at the moment. Unless you’re using the ax clients only in the same room and you have Ethernet cables + APs every 1/2 walls to cover all the house.

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Yes every iPhone since the 11 supports 802.11ax.

So:
11 and derivatives
SE 2020
12 and derivatives
13 and derivatives
SE 2022

I tried this by system upgrading from RC6 and was hit with nothing but issues on wifi so I downgraded back to RC6...not sure what the issue was maybe some of my installed packages not sure...

how do you get up to 28 dBm? max I see is 20

All I needed to do was to set the country code for the Wi-Fi to Bolivia

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awesome ty!

Do you live in Bolivia?
Don't set codes for anything else than the country your device is located in.

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@giuliomagnifico i guess you have sent the wax202 back already, right? if you still have it, have you tried using ax on the 2.4GHz band? 2.4GHz is supposed to reach higher distances than 5GHz. So you could compare 802.11n (2.4GHz) vs 802.11ax (2.4GHz).

By the way found this website quite helpful:

Estimated Attenuation at 900MHz:

The website has a factual error: > -30 dBm = Overloaded, not Excellent.

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