Does a question E900 router have low internet speed?
Does a question E900 router have low internet speed?
150 and 300Mbps are the best limits for one or two antennas on N, assuming a 40MHz wide channel on 2.4GHz, which is really impossible unless you live alone in the country with no neighbors nearby. At 20MHz with just one antenna (unless your cameras have two), the top limit before overhead is 72.2Mbps, but after that you'd want to aim for about 54Mbps of actual data speed. Note that some wifi chips like Atheros can't set a short guard interval on 20MHz 2.4GHz, so even better limits are lower at 65Mbps. So why do you only get 10 or 2Mbps? That's because older drivers and firmware don't handle interference well. Lots of things like security cameras and baby monitors use wifi frequencies but aren't actual wifi, so they won't show up in any wifi traffic analyzer tool. They broadcast spread-spectrum to corrupt your wifi packets and force retransmits, which slows everything down a lot. I would suggest loading FreshTomato firmware onto that router because Broadcom MIPsel routers keep getting new drivers even though the original one was old, so there are lots of newer options available now. While DD-WRT is listed as supporting the E900, I'd avoid it just because the latest version anyone has reported working in their forums came from 2020. BTW most cable internet is faster than the rated speed whenever you have extra bandwidth (with Comcast it's usually 118%, so for a 100Mbit service you probably don't want QoS set much lower than 118Mbps), but your old router only has 10/100 ethernet ports, so you'll never see this even if you plug in a cable.
The router has two antennas to connect to clients that have two antennas, which makes it faster. If you only use phones or single-antenna devices like laptops, they will be slower because the client can only talk to one antenna at a time. With 20MHz N, using two clients gets about 85Mbit per second in real life, while with three clients (a 3x3 setup) you get closer to 100Mbit per second. Most routers advertised as N900 actually just add up the speeds of both frequencies (450 on 2.4GHz plus 450 on 5GHz), but they don't always work that way in practice.
I agree with you about those posts above. Wi-Fi isn't as easy for most people to figure out as it looks on the router box. Those numbers shown there aren't real data rates. I think you should run a speedtest on some other device, like your cameras, because that's how they measure things. Can you try using an ethernet cable instead of wifi so we can test if you actually get the speed your internet company promises? Maybe if you tell us the model numbers of the cameras, others here could help figure out what data encoding works and if changing the router would help. Although 10mbps isn't a lot, it's very common to only get like 30mbps on routers that aren't great. Just remember those big numbers like 150 or 300 are not real speeds; they're just marketing tricks used in fake lab tests that don't reflect how things work normally.