Gadgetory

welcome everyone to my sexy router video doing my best to make router sexy I will start this video off with a confession as of yesterday I still only had a toe 2.11 n Wi-Fi here in my home it may come as a shock to many of you who believe that I am always at the forefront of technology but I can explain why with two simple words Gigabit Ethernet I have cat 6 cable like this running up through my attic I actually documented this on an epic episode of pimp my attic a few months back so check that out if you're interested it means that all my desktop PCs here in the garage back in the computer room are hardwired but that's not to say that I don't use Wi-Fi here in my house phones laptops sometimes even cameras hit up the 2.4 gigahertz and thye gigahertz bands like 16 year old groupies at a One Direction concert but the a total of an N connection provided by my trusty asus RT and v 6u router that i've had for a few years now has always been adequate and yes i updated the firmware why settle for adequate though when you can get better than adequate I decided it was time to try 802 11 AC so my journey to 802 dot eleven AC Wi-Fi began when I received this ten to AC fifteen router based on the Box you might think it's the ten de a C 1900 router but no it's the AC 15 the 1900 refers to the six hundred megabits per second of bandwidth on the 2.4 gigahertz band and 1,300 available on the five gigahertz band why this router though it's not necessarily the fastest in its class and the reviews for it to be honest you're actually kind of mediocre but it's pretty damn cheap it's about 84 bucks right now compared to 120 to 200 for similar models from Netgear asus d-link and lynxes and it's got a wired Gigabit Ethernet hub so my wire LAN should stay intact and up to speed beyond that if it can deliver consistent 802 mm AC speeds which it should be able to do if it adheres to the spec I will be happy other than dual band 802 11 ac support the AC 15 also sports a bubbly glossy black plastic finish which i think is pretty terrible to be honest 3 antenna for a MIMO supports Bank of Lights up here on the front for status and connectivity indications a Wi-Fi Protected setup button and a dedicated Wi-Fi on/off button up here on top which I do like to have and on the back there's a power button and a jack a USB 3.0 plug that can be used for network storage or a network printer and for wired rj45 gigabit ethernet jacks one for your wind connection and three for your LAN connection only three LAN ports really tenda four is the standard for gigabit switch I will have you know I am disappointed so in my opinion a router should pretty much be invisible beyond setting it up naming the SSID something funny like NSA security drone the promised land or lord of the pings for more of these hilarious suggestions please visit the reddit thread linked in the description and of course using wpa2 encryption at the very least with a very strong password I don't want to know what's there or even think about it I just want it to work I'm just going to be doing the basic setup with ac15 unfortunately that wasn't too difficult once it's plugged in just access any connected pcs web browser and you should be Auto navigated 210 to Wi-Fi comm which lets you access the control panel the AC 15 has a range of features like cloud access packet prioritization ftp and VPN support but i've never used those features on any router and i don't really plan to now all I want to know about is speed and I can't really do some tests on that without some baseline tests on my existing Asus router my basic usage tests since I've already ran them didn't really show any marked difference between these two routers web browsing gaming and watching streaming 1080 video all worked just fine apart from out here in the garage where range becomes limited particularly on this one so to speed things up let's just move straight to the real deal test which is throughput or data transfer speed between locally connected devices to put too fine a point on it I've concocted a basic real world mixed file transfer test of about two gigabytes and I'll be seeing how long it takes to transfer from one wirelessly connected 802 dot 11 AC laptop to a wired system on the land also I'm transferring to and from SSDs so the only limiting factor here should be the router house you guys lucky we get to skip straight to the test results so here you can see on the Left I've got the living room the bedroom and the garage being in three locations that I tested in the living room being about 10 to 15 feet from the router with no walls in between the bedroom be a little bit further 20 to 25 feet with about two walls in the way and the garage is further thirty to forty five feet away and there's multiple things in the wall I kind of summed it up to being about two walls I tested the asu's as well as the tenda at five gigahertz and 2.4 gigahertz I tested both bands I was doing that 2 gig transfer it makes file types and then I ran three tests each time and at the top you can see the average time as well as calculated out two megabytes per second so as you can see the living room tests went pretty well for the ASIS of course although you do notice a little bit of a performance boost of 5 gigahertz note this asterisk title here that's because the ASIS are TN five six you and part of the reason I'm intending to get rid of it is that it's been freezing up here and there it was really random it actually hadn't done it for maybe a month or two but during the course of the testing I was able to get it to do it so that's why I threw that result out when it wasn't locking up because it was very obvious when it was it still got this much so for the rest of the tests I ran through everything but although bear in mind once I got here to the garage for the Asus router the signal was a little bit too weak on 5 gigahertz to pick up anything and then on 2.4 gigahertz I was able to get connect to the network but it's really unstable it kept dropping out at most it gave a 12 to 14 min ata now look at here you'll notice that the 10 does results especially if you're looking at only 5 gigahertz are pretty much faster across the board compared to the the AC Swaggart's in fact almost doubling of speed from 15 to about 28 or 29 megabytes per second here in the living room it's definitely slowed down a lot when I put more obstructions in between down to 12.1 megabytes per second and 11 1.1 megabytes per second the 2.4 gigahertz results though I was actually pretty disappointed with you'll note here compared to the the living room and bedroom tests the speeds were actually slower on the tender for 2.4 gigahertz than the Asus trade-off there being that I was able to connect out here in the garage so I do have results for the tend out here whereas the ASIS would just I wasn't even able to run the test so there you go definitely faster speeds with the tenda but slower speeds on 2.4 gigahertz now if you don't do a lot of file transferring around your home network then you might think that 802 dot 11ac isn't really necessary and that could be true but also consider this a faster router also helps when you have multiple devices connected to it this is because a router does not talk to multiple devices at the same time it switches off between them one at a time this means that if each transmission completes more quickly it will speed up the queue for all the other connected devices something to think about so final thoughts on the 10:00 to AC 15 would be I like that it's significantly faster on 5 gigahertz and it definitely has better range than my old router set up was pretty simple and I have a new respect for those Wi-Fi transfer speeds especially when I'm at close range I don't like that it only has three gigabit ethernet ports instead of four it's limited and then it must be positioned upright on a stand and there is no wall mount included also if I'm being picky the design is just pretty hideous my wife said that it looks like a cheap person if anyone's feeling that my biggest concern of course was the limited 2.4 gigahertz performance and this is a huge example of how even industry standard specifications don't always match up with expected performance the trade-off is the increased range which does seem to be giving me much more stable connections out here in the garage overall I'm happy with switching over to 802 that 11ac with enhanced range again being the most significant factor and that speed boost being a bit of icing on the cake what are you guys using for wireless at home though have you jumped up to 802 11 AC are you still using something older personally I'm going to stick with the 10 to AC 15 for now since it's getting a job done and it's not locking up like my old router was but in the future I'm probably going to be looking at maybe building a pfsense router of my own hardware because I'm do that kind of thing anyway if you enjoyed this video don't forget to hit that like button down there also you can use my amazon link which is in the description for US and UK if you're shopping for holiday gifts or whatever else you can also feel free to visit my store at store Paul's Hardware net where you can support me by picking up a shirt or a mug or a pint glass none of which I have examples of right here but trust me they're nice also don't forget to subscribe to my channel for more tech videos this will probably be my last router video for the while but as always thanks for watching