Poor wifi speed on new B1300 - would MediaTek be better?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
29

Yes it's true, one should know what one's buying. Yet I think the verdicts in your comment may be based on assumptions. Regarding the Archer C7:

  • We're discussing the use of a C7 as an access point, so the lack of optimised NAT (LAN ↔WAN) which limits uplink traffic to 250 Mbit/s or so is not an issue (and it also seems that's going to be fixed by OpenWRT 19.01).
  • WLAN ↔ LAN throughput under OpenWRT is also worse with OpenWRT than with stock firmware, it peaks around 450 Mbit/s vs. 750 Mbit/s. How relevant this is depends on the use case.
  • (I'm referring to TP-Link Archer C5 AC1200 / TP-Link Archer C7 AC1750 / TP-Link TL-WDR7500, and there are several discussion threads in this regard.)
  • It was said that the prices for the RT-AC58U, EA6350 v3 and C7 v5 are identical, which is not the case everywhere on the globe.

Regarding WiFi:

  • It's not always the case that one can use WiFI channels exclusively.
  • When you're not the only one operating WiFi APs, and / or due to regulatory aspects (which are country specific), the number of available 80 MHz channels may be limited (e.g. when you operate several APs which need to use different channels), so "AC1200" (867@5GHz, such as the EA6350) would @40MHz be limited to 400 Mbit/s while "AC1750" (1300@5GHz) can still provide 600 Mbit/s (to clients which support it, but of course that applies to all scenarios).
  • When sharing WiFi channels with neighbours, it's not so bad to have nominal high rates for using the time slots you have although your throughput will never be as high.
  • High bitrates at larger distance were not the original focus in this discussion thread. Rather, it was about several APs covering an area which, WiFi-wise, is separated into three sections.

And: I definitely believe that an EA56350 v3 with a quad core CPU is capable of higher throughput than the single core Archer C7 v5. But when exactly will that even be necessary? Its nominal 867 Mbit/s at 5 GHz will boil down to a maximum of 477 Mbit/s net traffic anyway.

So I suggest we agree on good old "YMMV"... :wink:

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