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.
Hi, I checked the TP-Link Archer C6U specs which have 4 antennas and dual-band. If I connect my camera using only one antenna for 2.4GHz, the speed should be about 300Mbps to 4 times half-duplex wifi divided by two? Does this change how it works on the 5GHz band too?
It's way more complicated than I thought. Antennas don't work like that on their own. Every device uses different antennas, and they take turns using one or a few at a time. That is just the half-duplex problem: only one thing can talk when there are many people talking. What specific camera do you have? The connection speed will never be higher than what both your router and your camera can do. To get 300 Mbps, you need to use the 40 MHz radio bands at first, and you must use two antennas at once (2x2 MIMO). This is before any extra delays and the half-duplex issue. If you are really lucky, you might get 50 to 60 Mbps. Now if your camera only supports one antenna or only 20 MHz radio bands, you are back down to 72.2 Mbps, which makes things worse because there is overhead and the half-duplex problem. You will probably end up at most 30 Mbps. This also ignores that all cameras in your system are fighting for the same radio bandwidth, so this will make your maximum speed even lower than expected.
They both use completely different radio chips, so there is no effect. The real issue isn't that one device makes another slow. It's because they fight for the same limited bandwidth. Wifi can handle devices at different speeds and just changes how it sends data when moving from one to the other. So a very fast device won't get slowed down by a slow one, but how much total data does that slower device need to send?
yes I just bought a tplink archer c80 ac1900. when I plug in one camera to 2.4ghz, i don't want to connect the second one because only one camera can talk at once. should i be able to connect both and use the 5ghz for my personal stuff?