I got the GL-AR150 specifically for the Wi-Fi repeater mode, I wanted to make my own separate network for my devices, my router is kind of old and won't let me make more separate networks.
I get 300mbps up and down, but when I use the AR150's network, I only get 5mbps up and down.
I'm confused because my router is literally the next room over, am I doing anything wrong?
Where did you find this available, support was discontinued in December 2023:
Just recently found it in my project supply's, I just never used it, sealed.
I bought for travel before covid, and put it in my supply box.
After the confusion, start digging, measuring, and analyzing.
Wifi performance is an interesting area to explore.
There are many misconceptions on the performance numbers, but 5 Mbps is really low.
Follow the path from the main router. The ISP link seems to be at least 300Mbps.
What will carry this load?
-Wifi , we face 3 different numbers here: interface rate , actual interface rate, data throughput. The max and actual interface rate is common knowledge for 802.11a,b,g, and for ,n,ac wifi modes, their rate is dependent on " MCS setting/bandwidth/# of streams " (http://mcsindex.com)
Check what you get with the next room setup. MCS will fluctuate and can go low when signal passes a wall. MCS will go low when the signal is lower than -80dBm. The multistream can drop to single stream. And wifi technology is 'single sender only' , so is unidirectional. The max data rate is 30 to 70% of the actual interface rate. So bidirectional can halve the rate, and 'repeater on the same radio' on the GL-AR150 can half it again.
Any other transmitter will take away some of the wifi air-time. A slow connection will take a lot more of that airtime, and could bring down any fast connection to work as slow as the slow connection, due to the long waiting for the slow transmitter to end.
Through to wall signal can corrupt packets and cause retransmits over and over , so can reduce the effective throughput another 2 to 7 times.
Getting 100 to 160 Mbps unidirectional throughput with other radio as repeater is what I expect in a good setup (40Mhz channel width/ dual stream/ MCS9 (400Mbps)) Be aware that a (80MHz channel width/dual stream/MCS9/866Mbps) might not be better unless you have a very good aggregation.
And then there is possible interference with other wifi senders, on the same channel sharing the transmission time even if that signal is very weak, or adjacent channel interference destructing each others transmissions.
(Microwave oven and USB3 are also transmitters for 2.4GHz wifi)
And then comes the data transmission protocol. TCP congestion avoidance over different media can reduce the transmission throughput a lot.
I did a test, I used my laptops hotspot connected to my Wi-Fi, and I got 140mbps, it's on 2.4GHz as well.