Noobie question about router speeds.

[Phinbar]

I was reading about routers, dual band, etc. and saw that the high-end routers from Asus and others claimed to have speeds of thousands of megabytes per second. Now, I'm guessing that's not the actual speed that I would get if I got one since here in Scotland I get 8mbs max and that's considered wizardry. So what's the correlation between the speeds that routers have written on the tin and what you would really get. I mean, why spend all that money when I can get a single band, 300mbs router and network card (which is what I have)?

[Cubit481]

First of all there is a difference between MBps and Mbps...megabytes per second and megabits per second...

[werto165]

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/5-pros-and-cons-to-5-ghz-wi-fi-routers.html

[AMICLG]

Well when they say AC1900 for example they mean up to 600 Mbps on 2.4 with that boost technology or 300 on just standard 2.4 Ghz N and 300-600 Mbps on 5 Ghz N or up to 1000Mbps on 5 Ghz AC but the range on 5 Ghz isn't that good and requires those big external antennae as well as more power going to them as 5 Ghz only has a wavelength of ~ 59mm and 2.4 ghz has a wavelength of ~ 124mm so 2.4 Ghz will travel much farther on less power and a lower gain antenna.

[qwertywarrior]

first two posters here wernt helpful what so ever

anyways

 

ill put it as simple as i can

 

these routers that have1000+ etc mbps wifi is the speed of sending data via  wifi useful when sending stuff in the same network (ie sending a movie to your brother in the next room via network sharing ) this has nothing to do with the speed your getting from you ISP

 

also like to point out that the advertised speed is a lot less than what you get in real world conditions

[Phinbar]

first two posters here wernt helpful what so ever

anyways

 

ill put it as simple as i can

 

these routers that have1000+ etc mbps wifi is the speed of sending data via  wifi useful when sending stuff in the same network (ie sending a movie to your brother in the next room via network sharing ) this has nothing to do with the speed your getting from you ISP

ok if I'm still limited by my ISP's speed - which is for almost everyone under 100MBps - why do companies make routers so fast. or am I missing something?

[TheRetiredSlave]

I was reading about routers, dual band, etc. and saw that the high-end routers from Asus and others claimed to have speeds of thousands of megabytes per second. Now, I'm guessing that's not the actual speed that I would get if I got one since here in Scotland I get 8mbs max and that's considered wizardry. So what's the correlation between the speeds that routers have written on the tin and what you would really get. I mean, why spend all that money when I can get a single band, 300mbs router and network card (which is what I have)?

If you're only using your router for accessing the internet from your PC or other devices, you're right in saying that a cheapo router that's "fast enough" is alright.. However, if you have your own storage NAS or other types of home servers and you need to move large files between them, having them all connected to a faster router will allow you to move those files much quicker than you could otherwise.

[qwertywarrior]

ok if I'm still limited by my ISP's speed - which is for almost everyone under 100MBps - why do companies make routers so fast. or am I missing something?

as i said

fast  wifi devices will have very high speeds "in home" if you have a wifi router that can send 300mbps via wifi you can send movies at high speeds in your house if its 1000+ then even faster

 

right now im streaming movies from my downstairs pc via lan to wifi to my laptop

if you just use ur computer to surf the net then fast wifi routers wont matter

[Andi]

I was reading about routers, dual band, etc. and saw that the high-end routers from Asus and others claimed to have speeds of thousands of megabytes per second. Now, I'm guessing that's not the actual speed that I would get if I got one since here in Scotland I get 8mbs max and that's considered wizardry. So what's the correlation between the speeds that routers have written on the tin and what you would really get. I mean, why spend all that money when I can get a single band, 300mbs router and network card (which is what I have)?

I think a router with AC has 1300Mbit/s wireless-N gets you up to 600Mbit/s so they claim 1900mbit/s but you can't use both at the same time with the same device. And you won't really get 1300Mbit/s more like 600

 

1300Mbit/s are ~160MB/s. in the best possible scenario it would be faster than gigabit ethernet. If you have a 8Mbit/s internet connection and you don't use your wlan for pushing data around in your house you don't need to upgrade.

[Phinbar]

as i said

fast  wifi devices will have very high speeds "in home" if you have a wifi router that can send 300mbps via wifi you can send movies at high speeds in your house if its 1000+ then even faster

 

right now im streaming movies from my downstairs pc via lan to wifi to my laptop

if you just use ur computer to surf the net then fast wifi routers wont matter

aaahhhhhhhhhhhh

[Phinbar]

If you're only using your router for accessing the internet from your PC or other devices, you're right in saying that a cheapo router that's "fast enough" is alright.. However, if you have your own storage NAS or other types of home servers and you need to move large files between them, having them all connected to a faster router will allow you to move those files much quicker than you could otherwise.

thanks, totally forgot that routers are used that way all together

[LAwLz]

In case you didn't understand qwertywarrior's explanation here is mine:

The speed on the router box refers to the maximum speed it can handle (in a perfect situation). Getting a 1300Mbps router won't increase your Internet connection speed since that will always be limited to 8Mbps (unless you upgrade by calling your ISP of course). However, sending stuff back and forth to the Internet is not the only thing your router does. I am going to use myself as an example here. I got a NAS in my house. It's basically a computer with a bunch of hard drives in it, and everyone on the network can access the stuff on the hard drives. I have a lot of movies and music on it, so I can stream movies to my phone, my tablet, my TV, my computer etc. When I stream things from my NAS to my phone, all the data goes from my NAS, to my router, and then to my phone. In this scenario, the data never leaves my house and is therefore not restricted to the 8Mbps my ISP gives me. If I get a faster router then I can send/receive files from my NAS faster, no matter what my Internet connection is capped at.

 

It's the same if you want to for example send a file from your desktop to your laptop. Since no data goes to the Internet (just back and forth between your desktop and laptop), it does not have the 8Mbps restriction.

This is why you might want to get a very fast router.

 

It's also important to know the difference between Mbps and MBps, and also the difference between real world performance and the theoretical max speed. Let's take your 300Mbps wireless router as an example. 300Mbps is the theoretical max speed. That is to say, you can only get 300Mbps if the conditions were absolutely perfect. This never happens in the real world though. A good rule of thumb in wireless is that you will usually get about half of the theoretical max speed. That brings your 300Mbps router down to 150Mbps. Now we have to convert from Mbps (megabit per second) to MBps (megabytes per second). To do this we take the Mb and divide by 8. In our example this is 150/8 which is about 19. On your 300Mbps router, you can get about 19MBps of throughput. When I read data from my NAS I usually get over 100MBps.

As you can probably tell, the 300Mbps wireless connection would heavily bottleneck me. I am sometimes being bottlenecked by my gigabit wired connection (1Gbps is 128MBps).

In wireless you also have to remember that everyone is sharing the bandwidth. You will only get ~19MBps if you are alone. If another person is on the network then you might only get ~9MBps.

 

If you don't transfer lots of stuff between your own computers then it doesn't really matter, but if you got a NAS like me then you probably want a router that can handle over 1000Mbps (especially for wireless).

 

There is stuff written about this in the sticky if you still got questions.