wiReless Router Reception & Range Round Up & Review Rinus Rech Rips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
3,145 words · ~15 min read
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got a very special treat for you guys I've got four routers I have a zeel nbg
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5715 I have a dink amplify uh 1,000
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whole home router I've got a lynxis e4200 and I have a trendnet Tew 692 grr
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I am going to be doing a range test with these four high-end routers I'm going to
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be using a reference this is an old Netgear wireless G router so don't judge
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Netgear based on their performance in this particular test that's just as a
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reference so for kind of if you have an old uh middle of the road router but
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it's kind of old then that should be a good reference point all right so what's
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unique about each of these routers let's do a quick summary so the zeel one has a
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feature that's called beam forming to support extended coverage what that
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basically means is it uses its three antennas 1 two three in order to focus
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uh Focus the transmission to where your devices are and uh extend the effective
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coverage now the dlink whole home amplify branded router is uses six
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antennas and dink's patented version
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called smartbeam which allows it to in theory according to dink provide pretty
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much the best coverage you can get this is a 300 megabit per second router this
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is a 450 megabit per second concurrent dual band router um the trendnet one
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here the 692 GR doesn't have that smart beam stuff so that's going to be a
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reference for a high-end dual Bend concurrent 450 mbit pers second router
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that does not have that technology and finally we've got the Cisco e4200 which
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is well okay lynus e4200 which I mean come on it's Cisco it's their high-end
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router right now let's see how it Compares what I'm going to be doing is
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I'm going to be taking this tablet right
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here and I am going to be walking around
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to uh three different reference points
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uh in around my property and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take
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readings and I'm going to it's going to be approximate a little bit guys this is
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not perfect science I'm going to take readings on both the 2.4 GHz wireless
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network as well as the 5 GHz wireless
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network and let you guys know how it's going to go for all of the routers I am
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using their maximum transmit power I am going to be using Channel 6 for Wireless
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N 2.4 GHz and there's a reason I'm doing that the reason is there is one other
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network in my neighborhood using Channel 6 we're going to see how it performs
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when there's one uh low signal strength Network that's interfering a little bit
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these are both me I have two routers on right now don't worry I won't be doing
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that during the test and then uh Channel
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and then 5 GHz I'm going to be using the
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default which is let it find its own frequency and see how well it can
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perform at 5 GHz with no interference letting it pick its own transmission
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speed so I'm going to show you guys all the different places where I'm going to
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test from and uh yeah let's see how this goes all right the routers have their
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firmwares updated so here we go we're going to do the Baseline first that is
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the zeel or the uh the ne gear model and
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so uh Baseline reading shows us that yes the net gear router is very strong I
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also want to talk a little bit about come on Focus please I want to talk a
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little bit about the rating system here so we can see these are rated in Deb
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from -40 to -00 with this being better
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so every approximately 3 Deb represents
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a having of the transmission and
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receiving power okay guys so if it falls down to minus uh 43 1 2 3 here that
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means it's about half as strong as - 40 if it falls down to -50 that means it is
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1110th as strong as -40 so I want you guys to bear that in mind- - 50 is
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1/10th as strong as - 40 - 60 is a 10th
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as strong as that or 100th as strong as this - 70 is another 10th of 60 80th of
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70 and so on and so forth so 10 100 1,000 10,000
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100,000 a million so this is actually a million times less strong than that
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according to my quick math which might be wrong but you guys get the point okay
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so it's a factor of 10 every time we go 10 of these all right let's go so
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Baseline reading a meteor away from the router is obviously good but let's go to
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the guest bedroom and I'll show you guys where I'm going to put the tablet when I
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take my measurements in here all right
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so I'm going to put the tablet right
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here and fire up Wi-Fi analyzer now this
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test isn't going to be perfect you guys are going to have to rely on me to
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approximate in a way that is Meaningful and representative of the facts because
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here's the reality of it when we look at the gear router here you can see it
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moves around a lot so between
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-70 here and -80 has already occurred
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which means that that's that's a 10 times difference just between those two
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lines so all my other routers are off these are just neighboring routers that
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are interfering right now all of my neighbors are off so that means that um
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actually this one of my neighbors is stronger than the Netgear one through
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about four walls between my guest bedroom and the computer room there so
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this is where the tablet will sit when I take this particular reading and I will
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not stand between it and the router I'll let it stabilize a little bit and then
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I'll probably provide a range So based on looking at this I would say somewhere
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in the you know what it might just be here now that I'm not standing in the
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way anymore I can probably just say minus 70 for
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that if it keep climbing I might do a range sorry guys I know this is kind of
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dragging on yeah I'll probably just say minus 70 for that or minus 70 to uh
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minus 65 our next test location is going to be
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down in the garage cuz that is somewhere that I often use my
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tablet we got some interesting props being made down here right now for the
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NC Christmas party okay moving over here
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okay in the garage over here going over to my racket
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stram machine where I often put a tablet so I can watch videos so
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this with me standing right here cuz there's not a whole lot of other room
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for me uh this is where it will go for
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the garage test and so I'm just going to
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do the reference score for the net gear
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router here let things stabilize a little bit wow there's a lot of
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different uh lot of different potentially interfering Wi-Fi networks
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down here so that'll help evaluate the
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routers and some way I would imagine okay so since we've been down
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here for this one I'm probably going to say something
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like let's maybe wait for one or two more ticks
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here but this one looks an awful lot likeus 60 to me yep we're going to go
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with minus 60 for that one all right we're off to the next destination and
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that is outside yes The Great Outdoors the
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gamer's worst enemy unless it's like beautifully rendered direct X11 Outdoors
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okay so we're going outside and it's raining so let me just get my umbrella
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going here okay there we go so we're going to
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go all the way out to the back of my property you guys aren't going to be
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able to see a freaking thing for this part of the video but that's okay you'll
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just have to kind of trust me and see the pretty grass although I'm not going
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to hold the tablet out there too much cuz uh yeah it's raining and stuff and
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right now I'm holding a camera a tablet my notepad and an umbrella and trying
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not to drop any of them because they're
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all valuable and stuff okay so we're a yeah let's go to
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the shed that's perfect because that way I can actually put the tablet somewhere
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so my house is over there okay that's the guest bedroom right in the middle of
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the frame right now you guys so that should give you some idea how much
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further away we are now it's probably about another
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um I'd say we're about another 15 M away
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so maybe about 45 ft for the Americans in the audience okay here we are
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dropping the umbrella so I'm going to put it right on
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the corner of this
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workbench and we are going to see aha so
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we saw what happened to the wireless signal as we moved away from the house
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and we can see that for all intents and purposes it's pretty much crap from here
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which is actually exactly what I was hoping because this is meant to be our
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reference and then we're going to see if powerful new routers can punch through
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the distance and space between my house
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and my shed and uh deliver a good
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Wireless routing experience so we're going to call that about minus 85 now
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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
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these measurements for all these different routers and I will present the results at the end it'll be timec
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consuming but you guys are worth it so I'm going to try and keep this
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reasonably short but it's going to be pretty difficult let me start off by
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saying that I beat up this sort of old I
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called it old a lot of times this net gear router uh at the very beginning of
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this but uh so what is this the wgr 614
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V7 okay so this little router you know
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showed up showed up for the fight and in spite of its one antenna so this is a
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three antenna model three antennas six internal antennas no idea but it's got
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internal antennas and according to linkis they're pretty Beast uh grouter
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so this is an n450 uh megabit concurrent
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dual band 450 megabit concurrent dual band 450/30 uh dual band and and a 300
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megabit single band wireless G single
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band okay let's go through some numbers here so computer room guest bedroom
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garage and backyard shed those are my four columns okay so the neear router
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gave us Baseline readings of about let's okay remember higher numbers are worse
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the lower number the better the reception was okay guys so that means
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that minus 40 here that's kind of a baseline okay so then we're somewhere in
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the 65 to 70 range 60 in the garage and
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85 at the backyard shed at the end of it all this was actually one of the best
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scores posted in the backyard shed the lynus e4200 actually you know what let's
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go computer room first let's do it that way we'll go column by column so in the
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computer room the strongest Baseline reading was the uh whole home router
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from dlink actually no it was the 692 gr from trenet only on its 2.4 GHz band
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though what's weird is it was significantly worse on its 5 GHz band
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and this trend continued throughout the entire test so that's the the only
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consistent score that was best was the whole home router at -25 the lynus e4200
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was at about -48 -30 this trend also
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continued the whole time the 2.4 GHz band not performing nearly as well on
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the e4200 as the 5 GHz band so the
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winner in the computer room I'm going to go ahead and give it to the dlink whole
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home router remember that's the one one that has the multiple antennas that uh
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detect where you are and then Orient their Wireless uh coverage to best suit
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you in the guest bedroom the Far and Away winner was the whole home router
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from dlink the DI 6 uhoh 61 hold on 614
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or something like that 645 the dir 645
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so remember minus 54 compared to let's say the lynus e4200 best score of -62 is
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almost 10 times better than -62 which is the 5 GHz band and is uh 100 times
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better than- 74 on the 2.4 GHz band to
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give you guys some context for that number so all the other ones are in that
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like on10th the strength of the whole home router here however when we get
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down to the garage it loses that lead so about 3 DB is about double is double so
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what that means is that the e4200 2.4 GHz band now scores double as well as
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the whole home router's 2.4 GHz band remember this is a single band router so
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there's no getting away from interference so this might work really
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well in a large home in like Suburbia
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but if you were in a condo this would not be the best solution because it
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doesn't have dual band so you're going to have to fight with all those other people with their with their old cheap
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routers see I I keep beating this up but it performed really really well look at
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this it's it actually gave up the best score in the garage so anyway yeah by
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old I just mean 2.4 GH running on those
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same frequencies that are very crowded so that's what it'll have to compete
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with and uh yeah as my okay my so my
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hypothesis about uh this guy the 645 is
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that at a moderate
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range it is able to align itself to perform as you can see here dramatically
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better than the static uh orientation of
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their Wireless zones routers however as we get further away it really drops off
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one of the other things I also also did observe is that about this number is
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that while this is a little bit lower than some of the other routers it was
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always very consistent so where with most of these routers I was looking at a
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graph that sort of went something like this and then I'm
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just kind of taking an average line for you guys here the whole home router was
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usually like that very very steady these
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numbers are 100% absolute at these locations which is very interesting okay
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so in the garage yes the big winner was the old Netgear router the G router
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however okay something to bear in mind here too though guys is that compared to
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let's say the uh the lyus c4200 where we
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have got about half the signal strength in the garage on the 5 GHz ban we're
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talking Wireless N4 50 megabit per second we're talking if your tablet is
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Wireless N this is probably still going to give you better speed than ancient
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Wireless G 54 megabit per second
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um with a better signal strength so just because you have an old router just
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because your strong signal your signal strength is strong doesn't mean your
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data transfer rate is actually the best that's something I'll probably want to
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investigate a little bit later though I just didn't have time tonight so let's
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go to the backyard shed um the only router that really the only routers that
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really passed this test were the Netgear router and the dlink di6 45 the other
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routers failed it on at least one of their bands which means they dropped
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below minus1 100 so the 4200 just barely
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hung in there on its 5 GHz band it managed to hold a line atus 95 and I was
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like okay I guess you probably can't even browse the web at that kind of signal strength and then the zeel and
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the trendnet routers on their 2.4 GHz bands were able to achieve um above
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minus 90 once again though these weren't they they looked like this you're
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probably not even browsing the web at that kind of signal strength so okay I'm
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going to go through the graph one more time Netgear linkis dlink Ze will trend
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computer room guest bedroom garage backyard shed these are the
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numbers when I've split the column that means I'm looking at the two bands
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separately 2.4 and 5 GHz so you can see I've done that so I just want the camera
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to go and have a oh okay come look at me and then go have a close look at the
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graphs if you guys want to pause that and just kind of look at it in detail I
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think there's some interesting information here at the end of the day
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though what we've what we've come down to is that advances and anten technology
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are not really um moving that far ahead
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unless we look at specific cases like
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the uh Dr 645 where at moderate ranges
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and even at extreme ranges we were able to achieve a much more steady signal
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even though as when we got to slightly further away distances it wasn't a it
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wasn't necessarily a stronger signal than the others just more steady so
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thank you for checking out this little Roundup I hope you guys found it useful
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