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RAX80 wifi speed reduced
I have 400 Mbps download speed from Spectrum and from the beginning I've been getting about 80 download speed on all my wifi devices. Upload has been a steady 20 Mbps. I followed the suggestions in t...
It is very hard with 2 stream WiFi radios. Depending on the model, you will top out at a 400Mbps PHY rate, though due to how noisy the 2.4GHz band is, since it is used by a massive range of other wireless devices, including various high powered comercial transmitters, it is just a noisy band in general.
Smart connect will try to push dual band 802.11ac and 802.11ax devices to the 5GHz band when the SNR is good enough. For example, if your client devices are not capable of using 160MHz channel width, then you will see some beenefit from setting the router to use 80MHz channel width on the 5GHz band, because then you will not be forced into the DFS restrictions, which can make it more likely for smart connect to push your device to the 5GHz band at range.
With and without 20/40MHz Coexistence, I am getting around the 150 Mbps range. It does fluctuate between 135-170. My signal strength at the point of testing was -52dBm for 2.4GHz (-58dBm for 5.0 GHz) and I got as close to the router and I achieved 186 at that time but never came close to 200 Mbps while having Coexistence disabled. I live in a rural area with only 2 other wifi bands casting in my area and they're pretty weak by the time they get to me.
I have not messed around too much with the 5G because at this point I would need to disable Smart Connect, as I do not know another way to connect to 5G directly.
Is it not possible to increase 2.4GHz speed more than that? Is barely pushing 200 Mbps all I can expect?
It is very hard with 2 stream WiFi radios. Depending on the model, you will top out at a 400Mbps PHY rate, though due to how noisy the 2.4GHz band is, since it is used by a massive range of other wireless devices, including various high powered comercial transmitters, it is just a noisy band in general.
Smart connect will try to push dual band 802.11ac and 802.11ax devices to the 5GHz band when the SNR is good enough. For example, if your client devices are not capable of using 160MHz channel width, then you will see some beenefit from setting the router to use 80MHz channel width on the 5GHz band, because then you will not be forced into the DFS restrictions, which can make it more likely for smart connect to push your device to the 5GHz band at range.
That is pretty disappointing. I would understand if I'm in the suburbs and there's a lot going on, at that point the presence of noise is somewhat justified, having wifi speed cut in half being 6ft away from router on 2.4GHz band is surprising.
I did change the channel width for the 5GHz to "Up to 2400 Mbps" and tested it yesterday but I didn't see a difference. I should have waited longer to see if my laptop would have connected to the 5GHz at that point then tested. As for the devices, most are on ac, besides 2 Note 10s, nothing uses ax band. When I get back home after work I'll revert 5GHz to 2400 Mbps and monitor it for a while to see if there's an improvement.
As for the 2 stream you refer to, is you're talking about ac/ax? If so, I tried disabling ax because not many devices do use it, however it crippled my speed to ~50Mbps.
At this point, I'm starting to quesiton Smart Connect also. Some games on my Note 10, when I switch rooms, go through "wifi loss" in some cases I'm able to resume, other times I have to relogin the game. I assume (maybe?) I'm going from 5GHz to 2.4GHz and that's why it's causing this slight disconnect.
Again, thank you very much for your help with this issue as it's been going on for years. I owe you lunch at this point.
I did see improvement overall when reducing the channel width to 80MHz. I have been tracking it over the weekend and it performed better than before. The speed itself didn't improve but connectivity between device and router did, might hit ~300Mbps on 5Ghz. Thank you for your help.