Is Wireless Networking FINALLY as Fast as Wired?? 802.11ad
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,343 words · ~6 min read
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the days of picking up the receiver and hearing the Banshee scream of
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56k followed immediately by the four
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laoren whales of whoever was in the middle of an hours long anime music
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video download are over and the latest Wireless standards are better than ever
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claiming to be as fast as running a
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physical wire but is Wireless ad any
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good I mean AD can you believe this have
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you heard about this ads in our Wi-Fi
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how dare they I mean well okay hold on a second they do pay the bills around here
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so tell you what why don't you watch an
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ad and see if it's that bad before you make up your
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mind cooler Master's 25th anniversary
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edition Cosmos 2 features a unique dual
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curved tempered glass side panel check it out now at the link
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below let's start this by saying that 802.11 ad is not just a new revision of
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an existing standard like AC Wave 2 was
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you can learn more about that one here it's actually something new entirely you
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see Wi-Fi to date has traditionally used
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two major frequencies 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz
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what Wireless ad brings to the table is a new frequency 60 GHz and along with it
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speeds of up to 4.6 gabit per second and
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you might even see advertised speeds of up to 7.2 gbit per second although that
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isn't a new trick from Big Wi-Fi and if
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you read the fine print you'll see they're just combining the ad speeds
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with the other two frequencies well gee that sounds great lus but isn't 5 GHz
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already pretty difficult to use through walls wouldn't 60 GHz be even worse yes
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yes it would the higher the frequency of
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the radio wave the harder it is for it to penetrate a non-conductive solid like
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a wall or a person so at a wavelength of
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only 0.5 CM 60 GHz is likely to be
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absorbed or reflected by basically
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anything even very small obstacles but
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enough High School science it's summer and you've got better things to do right
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like watching us give you these juicy performance numbers from the Netgear
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r9000 Nighthawk X10 and tplink Talon
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ad7200 so we fired up I perf using a
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script we wrote In order to launch four simultaneous instances and record the
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output into easily digestible CSV files
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testing both routers and our test laptop
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with 2.4 5 and 60 GHz it should be noted
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that because this is an investigation into 802.11 ad performance and not uh a
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router Roundup we are focusing on single
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client performance starting with 2.4 GHz
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we can see that we're really struggling to maintain a stable speed each of the
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four ier streams is competing with each other for bandwidth 5 GHz on the other
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hand was nice nice and clean about what
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you'd expect from a wired connection albeit a slower one 60
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GHz screaming fast as advertised but we
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did note quite a bit of variation between our streams and our Netgear test
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chart here perfectly demonstrates something that wasn't advertised that we
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will get to momentarily comparing the averages both of our routers were more
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or less on par with each each other in every spectrum and moving on to our file
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copy tests we found more predictable results 802.11 ad gives a significant
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realworld boost in speed over the 5 GHz
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and 2.4 GHz BS similar in fact two wired
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speeds cool but where we depart from The
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Wire is in Signal Integrity as part of
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our testing we tried to see how far we
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could go before are losing out on our
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big speed upgrade and for this we had to
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venture into the dreaded Realm of the
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outside world so then to test range we set up
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our Netgear Nighthawk on our brand new picnic table fired up I perf and started
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walking after an arduous
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63.5 ft Trek the 60 GHz signal dropped
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altogether rip signal 5 GHz and 2.4 G
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GHz were still going strong with Connection rates of 866 and 300 megabit
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per second respectively the TP-Link Talon same deal picnic table I perf
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walking and just before we keeled over from exhaustion at 90 ft well we didn't
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drop the signal but we might as well have because performance wasn't much
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better on 60 GHz than it was on 2.4 but
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I mean that's not too bad my house is less than 60 ft across one small problem
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though it has stuff in it so let's simulate then stuff in the way we used
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the Netgear router box as our first obstruction before we add it wait what
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are you serious the Box caused the 60
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GHz signal to drop out all it has in it
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is cardboard and paper as for the TP
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Link oh okay here we get a better result
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latency increased a little bit but otherwise it was still still connected
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okay then how about a computer monitor again the net gear dropped out and the
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TP-Link kept on trucking okay how about
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just turning your back to the router okay here we go this is where both
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routers failed this much sexy human body
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is just too much for our poor 60 GHz
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signal so then TPL link wins thanks to its array of eight freaking antennas
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right wrong let's take the fight back indoors in my office netgear's
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obstruction avoidance strategy of bouncing Wi-Fi signals around allowed it
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to go from struggling to penetrate a folded up tablecloth to delivering solid
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performance to a client directly behind
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my monitor so ad Wireless then there are
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some obvious early adopter hassles like
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limited availability of compatible clients and high costs and piling on top
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of that there are some less obvious hassles like probably needing to run a
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cable to the middle of your ceiling to get your access point line of sight to
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everyone in the room but in certain applications we definitely see the
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potential here and I am pretty stoked to see like home Mesh networking Solutions
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based on this Tech as an alternative finally to this kind of nonsense but as
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for whether you're ready for a wireless ad router to today well I think it's
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today so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that
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button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we
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