View from the Labs
Wireless networking is a fickle thing, but if a router can stand out from the crowd in my house, it should do so in yours too
“As our libraries of personal data grow too big to sensibly live in the cloud, the home network is becoming more important than ever”
Isay this every time we cover networking gear in the Labs, but it bears repeating: the results below show how this month’s crop of routers fared in my own home – but when it comes to wireless, every home is different. Your house surely has a different layout to mine, which is likely to have a significant effect on the way your Wi-Fi signal propagates. And that’s before we talk about unpredictable interference patterns from home appliances and neighbours’ wireless networks.
I’m not saying you should disregard my findings – just don’t be surprised if you buy one of our recommended routers and find that your connection is slightly faster or slower than mine was. These tests are more about establishing a hierarchy; based on the figures below, you can be pretty confident that, in a given environment, the Linksys EA9500 will deliver a stronger, faster connection than (say) the Virgin Media Hub.
And let’s take a moment to pick apart the idea of a “stronger, faster connection”. It would be horribly misleading to say that, in the world of Wi-Fi, strength and speed are simply different ways of looking at the same thing – but as a rule of thumb it’s not a million miles off. You can think of it like this: when the router and client have a strong, stable connection, they can spray data packets back and forth at top speed. When the connection is weaker, a higher proportion of those packets get lost or corrupted, and have to be resent. It ends up taking longer on average for a given chunk of data to travel through the air.
This is one reason why we carry out our performance testing over the local network, rather than using an internet-based speed testing service. According to Ofcom’s latest figures, the average broadband speed across the UK is 46Mbits/sec, equivalent to just under 6MB/sec. If I’d used such an internet connection to test wireless performance, 38 out of the 39 bars below would show a maxed-out download speed of 6MB/sec, which wouldn’t be very helpful.
Using an unthrottled local connection allows us to see exactly how fast each router can go – and that in turn gives us an idea of how well it’s likely to cope with adverse conditions and long-range connections. To reiterate, speed and strength don’t perfectly correlate: an iffy connection to a 2,133Mbits/sec radio might be faster or slower than a rock-solid one to an 867Mbits/sec radio, and your laptop’s antenna comes into play as well. Still, the results below let us declare with confidence that the Netgear X10 or Synology RT2600ac can sustain a connection in areas where the Sky Q Hub simply can’t reach.
Plus, local file transfer speed is far from academic. In my everyday life, I fill up my camera with blurry photos, record interminable guitar solos and even put together the odd clunky video; gigabytes of data get shunted around my LAN on a regular basis, and it’s all regularly backed up to my NAS drive. As our libraries of personal data grow too big to sensibly live in the cloud, the home network is becoming more important than ever; ideally, your router should let your devices communicate as smoothly and speedily as possible.