got a very special treat for you guys I've got four routers I have a zeel nbg
5715 I have a dink amplify uh 1,000
whole home router I've got a lynxis e4200 and I have a trendnet Tew 692 grr
I am going to be doing a range test with these four high-end routers I'm going to
be using a reference this is an old Netgear wireless G router so don't judge
Netgear based on their performance in this particular test that's just as a
reference so for kind of if you have an old uh middle of the road router but
it's kind of old then that should be a good reference point all right so what's
unique about each of these routers let's do a quick summary so the zeel one has a
feature that's called beam forming to support extended coverage what that
basically means is it uses its three antennas 1 two three in order to focus
uh Focus the transmission to where your devices are and uh extend the effective
coverage now the dlink whole home amplify branded router is uses six
antennas and dink's patented version
called smartbeam which allows it to in theory according to dink provide pretty
much the best coverage you can get this is a 300 megabit per second router this
is a 450 megabit per second concurrent dual band router um the trendnet one
here the 692 GR doesn't have that smart beam stuff so that's going to be a
reference for a high-end dual Bend concurrent 450 mbit pers second router
that does not have that technology and finally we've got the Cisco e4200 which
is well okay lynus e4200 which I mean come on it's Cisco it's their high-end
router right now let's see how it Compares what I'm going to be doing is
I'm going to be taking this tablet right
here and I am going to be walking around
to uh three different reference points
uh in around my property and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take
readings and I'm going to it's going to be approximate a little bit guys this is
not perfect science I'm going to take readings on both the 2.4 GHz wireless
network as well as the 5 GHz wireless
network and let you guys know how it's going to go for all of the routers I am
using their maximum transmit power I am going to be using Channel 6 for Wireless
N 2.4 GHz and there's a reason I'm doing that the reason is there is one other
network in my neighborhood using Channel 6 we're going to see how it performs
when there's one uh low signal strength Network that's interfering a little bit
these are both me I have two routers on right now don't worry I won't be doing
that during the test and then uh Channel
and then 5 GHz I'm going to be using the
default which is let it find its own frequency and see how well it can
perform at 5 GHz with no interference letting it pick its own transmission
speed so I'm going to show you guys all the different places where I'm going to
test from and uh yeah let's see how this goes all right the routers have their
firmwares updated so here we go we're going to do the Baseline first that is
the zeel or the uh the ne gear model and
so uh Baseline reading shows us that yes the net gear router is very strong I
also want to talk a little bit about come on Focus please I want to talk a
little bit about the rating system here so we can see these are rated in Deb
from -40 to -00 with this being better
so every approximately 3 Deb represents
a having of the transmission and
receiving power okay guys so if it falls down to minus uh 43 1 2 3 here that
means it's about half as strong as - 40 if it falls down to -50 that means it is
1110th as strong as -40 so I want you guys to bear that in mind- - 50 is
1/10th as strong as - 40 - 60 is a 10th
as strong as that or 100th as strong as this - 70 is another 10th of 60 80th of
70 and so on and so forth so 10 100 1,000 10,000
100,000 a million so this is actually a million times less strong than that
according to my quick math which might be wrong but you guys get the point okay
so it's a factor of 10 every time we go 10 of these all right let's go so
Baseline reading a meteor away from the router is obviously good but let's go to
the guest bedroom and I'll show you guys where I'm going to put the tablet when I
take my measurements in here all right
so I'm going to put the tablet right
here and fire up Wi-Fi analyzer now this
test isn't going to be perfect you guys are going to have to rely on me to
approximate in a way that is Meaningful and representative of the facts because
here's the reality of it when we look at the gear router here you can see it
moves around a lot so between
-70 here and -80 has already occurred
which means that that's that's a 10 times difference just between those two
lines so all my other routers are off these are just neighboring routers that
are interfering right now all of my neighbors are off so that means that um
actually this one of my neighbors is stronger than the Netgear one through
about four walls between my guest bedroom and the computer room there so
this is where the tablet will sit when I take this particular reading and I will
not stand between it and the router I'll let it stabilize a little bit and then
I'll probably provide a range So based on looking at this I would say somewhere
in the you know what it might just be here now that I'm not standing in the
way anymore I can probably just say minus 70 for
that if it keep climbing I might do a range sorry guys I know this is kind of
dragging on yeah I'll probably just say minus 70 for that or minus 70 to uh
minus 65 our next test location is going to be
down in the garage cuz that is somewhere that I often use my
tablet we got some interesting props being made down here right now for the
NC Christmas party okay moving over here
okay in the garage over here going over to my racket
stram machine where I often put a tablet so I can watch videos so
this with me standing right here cuz there's not a whole lot of other room
for me uh this is where it will go for
the garage test and so I'm just going to
do the reference score for the net gear
router here let things stabilize a little bit wow there's a lot of
different uh lot of different potentially interfering Wi-Fi networks
down here so that'll help evaluate the
routers and some way I would imagine okay so since we've been down
here for this one I'm probably going to say something
like let's maybe wait for one or two more ticks
here but this one looks an awful lot likeus 60 to me yep we're going to go
with minus 60 for that one all right we're off to the next destination and
that is outside yes The Great Outdoors the
gamer's worst enemy unless it's like beautifully rendered direct X11 Outdoors
okay so we're going outside and it's raining so let me just get my umbrella
going here okay there we go so we're going to
go all the way out to the back of my property you guys aren't going to be
able to see a freaking thing for this part of the video but that's okay you'll
just have to kind of trust me and see the pretty grass although I'm not going
to hold the tablet out there too much cuz uh yeah it's raining and stuff and
right now I'm holding a camera a tablet my notepad and an umbrella and trying
not to drop any of them because they're
all valuable and stuff okay so we're a yeah let's go to
the shed that's perfect because that way I can actually put the tablet somewhere
so my house is over there okay that's the guest bedroom right in the middle of
the frame right now you guys so that should give you some idea how much
further away we are now it's probably about another
um I'd say we're about another 15 M away
so maybe about 45 ft for the Americans in the audience okay here we are
dropping the umbrella so I'm going to put it right on
the corner of this
workbench and we are going to see aha so
we saw what happened to the wireless signal as we moved away from the house
and we can see that for all intents and purposes it's pretty much crap from here
which is actually exactly what I was hoping because this is meant to be our
reference and then we're going to see if powerful new routers can punch through
the distance and space between my house
and my shed and uh deliver a good
Wireless routing experience so we're going to call that about minus 85 now
that I've actually put it down and watched a couple ticks so what I'm going to do guys is now I'm going to take
these measurements for all these different routers and I will present the results at the end it'll be timec
consuming but you guys are worth it so I'm going to try and keep this
reasonably short but it's going to be pretty difficult let me start off by
saying that I beat up this sort of old I
called it old a lot of times this net gear router uh at the very beginning of
this but uh so what is this the wgr 614
V7 okay so this little router you know
showed up showed up for the fight and in spite of its one antenna so this is a
three antenna model three antennas six internal antennas no idea but it's got
internal antennas and according to linkis they're pretty Beast uh grouter
so this is an n450 uh megabit concurrent
dual band 450 megabit concurrent dual band 450/30 uh dual band and and a 300
megabit single band wireless G single
band okay let's go through some numbers here so computer room guest bedroom
garage and backyard shed those are my four columns okay so the neear router
gave us Baseline readings of about let's okay remember higher numbers are worse
the lower number the better the reception was okay guys so that means
that minus 40 here that's kind of a baseline okay so then we're somewhere in
the 65 to 70 range 60 in the garage and
85 at the backyard shed at the end of it all this was actually one of the best
scores posted in the backyard shed the lynus e4200 actually you know what let's
go computer room first let's do it that way we'll go column by column so in the
computer room the strongest Baseline reading was the uh whole home router
from dlink actually no it was the 692 gr from trenet only on its 2.4 GHz band
though what's weird is it was significantly worse on its 5 GHz band
and this trend continued throughout the entire test so that's the the only
consistent score that was best was the whole home router at -25 the lynus e4200
was at about -48 -30 this trend also
continued the whole time the 2.4 GHz band not performing nearly as well on
the e4200 as the 5 GHz band so the
winner in the computer room I'm going to go ahead and give it to the dlink whole
home router remember that's the one one that has the multiple antennas that uh
detect where you are and then Orient their Wireless uh coverage to best suit
you in the guest bedroom the Far and Away winner was the whole home router
from dlink the DI 6 uhoh 61 hold on 614
or something like that 645 the dir 645
so remember minus 54 compared to let's say the lynus e4200 best score of -62 is
almost 10 times better than -62 which is the 5 GHz band and is uh 100 times
better than- 74 on the 2.4 GHz band to
give you guys some context for that number so all the other ones are in that
like on10th the strength of the whole home router here however when we get
down to the garage it loses that lead so about 3 DB is about double is double so
what that means is that the e4200 2.4 GHz band now scores double as well as
the whole home router's 2.4 GHz band remember this is a single band router so
there's no getting away from interference so this might work really
well in a large home in like Suburbia
but if you were in a condo this would not be the best solution because it
doesn't have dual band so you're going to have to fight with all those other people with their with their old cheap
routers see I I keep beating this up but it performed really really well look at
this it's it actually gave up the best score in the garage so anyway yeah by
old I just mean 2.4 GH running on those
same frequencies that are very crowded so that's what it'll have to compete
with and uh yeah as my okay my so my
hypothesis about uh this guy the 645 is
that at a moderate
range it is able to align itself to perform as you can see here dramatically
better than the static uh orientation of
their Wireless zones routers however as we get further away it really drops off
one of the other things I also also did observe is that about this number is
that while this is a little bit lower than some of the other routers it was
always very consistent so where with most of these routers I was looking at a
graph that sort of went something like this and then I'm
just kind of taking an average line for you guys here the whole home router was
usually like that very very steady these
numbers are 100% absolute at these locations which is very interesting okay
so in the garage yes the big winner was the old Netgear router the G router
however okay something to bear in mind here too though guys is that compared to
let's say the uh the lyus c4200 where we
have got about half the signal strength in the garage on the 5 GHz ban we're
talking Wireless N4 50 megabit per second we're talking if your tablet is
Wireless N this is probably still going to give you better speed than ancient
Wireless G 54 megabit per second
um with a better signal strength so just because you have an old router just
because your strong signal your signal strength is strong doesn't mean your
data transfer rate is actually the best that's something I'll probably want to
investigate a little bit later though I just didn't have time tonight so let's
go to the backyard shed um the only router that really the only routers that
really passed this test were the Netgear router and the dlink di6 45 the other
routers failed it on at least one of their bands which means they dropped
below minus1 100 so the 4200 just barely
hung in there on its 5 GHz band it managed to hold a line atus 95 and I was
like okay I guess you probably can't even browse the web at that kind of signal strength and then the zeel and
the trendnet routers on their 2.4 GHz bands were able to achieve um above
minus 90 once again though these weren't they they looked like this you're
probably not even browsing the web at that kind of signal strength so okay I'm
going to go through the graph one more time Netgear linkis dlink Ze will trend
computer room guest bedroom garage backyard shed these are the
numbers when I've split the column that means I'm looking at the two bands
separately 2.4 and 5 GHz so you can see I've done that so I just want the camera
to go and have a oh okay come look at me and then go have a close look at the
graphs if you guys want to pause that and just kind of look at it in detail I
think there's some interesting information here at the end of the day
though what we've what we've come down to is that advances and anten technology
are not really um moving that far ahead
unless we look at specific cases like
the uh Dr 645 where at moderate ranges
and even at extreme ranges we were able to achieve a much more steady signal
even though as when we got to slightly further away distances it wasn't a it
wasn't necessarily a stronger signal than the others just more steady so
thank you for checking out this little Roundup I hope you guys found it useful
don't forget to subscribe to L techtips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos