WHAT’S KILLING YOUR WI-FI?
Wi-Fi is all around us and, with the advent of Wi-Fi 6, it’s getting better and better. Yet it’s hard to think of a technology where there’s a bigger gap between the manufacturers’ performance claims and the reality you can expect to see in your own home.
That’s partly down to the way wireless gear is marketed. For example, the Netgear Nighthawk RAX80, which is on PC Pro’s A-List (see p14), advertises a connection speed of up to 4.8Gbits/sec on its wireless radio. Since there are eight bits in a byte, that sounds like it will send data screaming down the line at 600 megabytes per second – but, in reality, you’ll never see anything resembling that sort of speed. For one thing, that 4.8Gbits/sec figure refers to the wireless link speed, not the data rate. The latter is always going to be a lot lower than the former, partly because alongside your files the radio needs to send and receive all sorts of information that defines and manages the flow of data.
The other reason is that if the remote client doesn’t confirm that it’s successfully received a packet of data, the router has to resend it. This is a perfectly normal part of the way Wi-Fi works, but it can slash your effective connection speed.
What does that mean in the real world? In our Labs tests, we’ve discovered that, far from the 600MB/ssec you might have hoped for, strong Wi-Fi connection will deliver around 65MB/sec
