Testing speeds by adding Wi-fi 6 dongle
To measure our actual data-transfer speeds, we added a D-link DWA-X1850 Wi-fi 6 USB adapter (£45 from www. snipca.com/40530) to an old Asus Vivobook laptop that doesn’t have Wi-fi built in (as pictured right), and used this to connect to a Netgear Nighthawk RAX70 Wi-fi 6 router ( www. snipca.com/40531, pictured below left). We attached an external hard drive to the router via USB, then measured how long it took to copy a single 500MB file, as well as a folder with 1,829 files that together totalled 500MB, from the laptop to the drive.
Our results were influenced by the speeds of the USB adapter and router, the data connection between them, any interference or obstructions from other devices, networks, walls and doors, the speed of the drive connected to the router, and the SSD in the laptop. However, crucially, it shouldn’t have been impacted by less predictable internet congestion because the operation was confined entirely to our local network.
The tests were performed in two locations: once, downstairs, in the same room as the router, and again on an upper floor, one room to the side. As an added complication, our test home has been insulated to eco-home specifications – and these have previously hampered our Wi-fi 5 signals.
These results naturally take into account the write speed of the drive but, as you can see from the table below, Wi-fi 6 transferred both the single file and the folder of files faster than Wi-fi 5 in every instance.
When copying the single 500MB file between floors, it reached speeds of 191Mbps, and when in the same room this increased to 194Mbps. These were each a considerable improvement on the respective 55Mbps (nearly quadrupling) and 147Mbps we achieved when using the Wi-fi 5 components in our laptop to connect to the same router.
Perhaps more importantly, the performance drop when moving out of the room and going upstairs was slight when using Wi-fi 6, but far more pronounced when using our laptop’s integrated Wi-fi 5 connection.
We performed the tests for a third time, with the laptop’s built-in Wi-fi 5 hardware connected to our existing Wi-fi 5 network, and the Wi-fi 6 dongle connected to the new Wi-fi 6 network simultaneously, and achieved mixed results.
Using this setup, transferring the single 500MB file between floors was slower than using Wi-fi 6 only, but transferring the 500MB folder was fractionally faster. However, when we were in the same room as the router, we saw a slight improvement in both cases.
In practice, whether connected only to the Wi-fi 6 network, or both networks simultaneously, it’s likely we would not have noticed any difference had we not been timing the process.
Switching between Wi-fi 5 and 6 is easy – just click the Wi-fi icon in your taskbar (or the joint Wi-fi/speaker/ battery icon in Windows 11 – see screenshot above), then select the network. Confusingly, the options you’re shown don’t match the actual Wi-fi standard, so in our screenshot, ‘Wi-fi 2’ is Wi-fi 5, while ‘Wi-fi 3’ is Wi-fi 6.