Anand reviews Apple 802.11ac - 533 Mbps

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
23,825
1,396
126
Anand is getting iperf speeds of well over 500 Mbps.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-air-review-13inch/9

My desk and test area is in the corner of my office, which is where I put the ASUS 802.11ac router. Performance around my desk was always up around 533Mbps.

Move around 18 feet away but remain in the same room and measured performance dropped to 450Mbps. One set of walls and another 10 - 15 feet dropped performance to between 250Mbps - 340Mbps. Another set of walls without moving much further and I was looking at 200Mbps. When I went one more set of rooms away, or dropped down to a lower level, I saw pretty consistent falloff in performance - dropping down to 145Mbps. Note that my setup is pretty much the worst case scenario for longer distances. The AP isn’t centrally located at all. If I were setting up an 802.11ac network for max coverage, I’d probably see 300 - 400Mbps in most immediately adjacent rooms.


Real-world speeds were much slower, but it's not because of a limitation of the hardware. It is due to a software limitation in the settings as currently coded into Mountain Lion (and Mavericks). Hopefully this will be corrected by the time the new 802.11ac MacBook Pros come out, or else in the release version of Mavericks.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-air-review-13inch/10

The only way to get the full 533Mbps is by using a TCP window size that’s at least 256KB.

I re-ran my iPerf test and sniffed the packets that went by to confirm the TCP window size during the test. The results came back as expected. OS X properly scaled up the TCP window to 256KB, which enabled me to get the 533Mbps result:

OS X didn’t scale the TCP window size beyond 64KB, which limits performance to a bit above what I could get over 5GHz 802.11n on the MacBook Air. Interestingly enough you can get better performance over HTTP or FTP, but in none of the cases would OS X scale TCP window size to 256KB - thus artificially limiting 802.11ac.


If we can get 400+ Mbps real-world like Anand is getting in iperf, that'd be decent. My NAS maxes out at over 800 Mbps on Gigabit Ethernet, so half that over WiFi is nice, and a big improvement to what I'm getting over 802.11n.
 
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smackababy

Lifer
Oct 30, 2008
27,024
79
86
I don't have a 802.11ac router and since I just bought a new router not that long ago, I don't see me buying one any time soon.

That is impressive the throughput on wireless though. Eventually, ethernet will be obsolete. I really wish Apple would update the rMBP to Haswell already. I don't want to buy an Air, but I'd rather hold off until the rMBP refresh and it is taking too long! =(
 

Tweak155

Lifer
Sep 23, 2003
11,448
262
126
I haven't been keeping up on wireless... I could definitely make do with these speeds lol. My router is still 802.11g :biggrin:

But, my whole house is wired with gigabit switches & capable cables. I only use wireless for surfing or downloading sometimes (internet is only 25mbps).
 

sxr7171

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2002
5,079
40
91
I too have wired gigabit for all fixed machines. But still improved wireless is important for portables.

Right now I don't have a machine with 802.11ac compatibility and with today's machines you can't upgrade the card. So right now it looks like the MBA is the only machine I've found that supports this tech.

Frankly I think the Vaio Pro outshines the MBA in every which way except battery life and touchpad and I say this as a MBA user for 3 years. But it does not support 802.11ac. I think they kind of dropped the ball on that but I guess it also means I can wait a year or so for more machines to support it.

For now my last gen Time Machine has been rock solid. I also spread out access points using Airport Express units which sadly are crippled by 100mbps ethernet speeds. So sadly that oversight by Apple is my bottleneck. Unless my machine connects only to the Time Machine itself.
 

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
23,825
1,396
126
I've found wireless speeds to be so flaky, I pretty much use Gigabit Ethernet whenever possible.
At least with my 802.11n Macs and 802.11n Airport Extreme, I find wireless speeds to be fairly consistent when reasonably close to the router. The fluctuations in speed increase the further away I am from the router. IOW, not only do speeds decrease as you move away from the router, your so-called "flakiness" in speeds increases.

That said, Anand told us he can get 300-400 Mbps pretty consistently in iperf in rooms adjacent to the router. That's decent. In my house in my usage scenario that wouldn't be ideal, but I would be willing to augment with additional access points. Then we run into the problem of wireless handoffs not being handled well on consumer equipment, but I'd be willing to go to prosumer equipment with the Ubiquiti 802.11ac Unifi line.

I wouldn't do that this year, but would consider it later. In the meantime I'm just using 802.11n, for cost reasons... and also partially because 802.11ac isn't actually officially ratified yet. Maybe I'd wait until 2014 to get the second version of the 802.11ac MacBook Pro too.

Eventually, ethernet will be obsolete.
I am optimistic that 10GigE for the home will be available and affordable by 2020. Why am I optimistic? Because it will run on a lot of existing CAT6 cabling. You may just have to reterminate. CAT6 is spec'd to run 10GigE up to 55 metres, and most runs in homes are under 40 metres, and in my (big) house nearly all are under 30 metres in fact. Actually, you could even make it work on lots of CAT5e installations. No, it's not in spec, but who cares in a home, as long as it works. BTW, Mellanox actually supported some of their 10GigE cards on CAT5e over short distances.

Why do I care? Cuz consumer NASes are limited to Gigabit Ethernet, so they max out at 100+ MB/s. You can get dual GigE NASes, but they are a problem to implement effectively in regular homes for various reasons, not the least of which is the fact that client equipment doesn't have dual GigE, and consumer switches can't handle it anyway.

10 GigE on NASes and client equipment would make things easy. Furthermore, by 2020, Terabyte SSDs will be common and affordable too.

I haven't been keeping up on wireless... I could definitely make do with these speeds lol. My router is still 802.11g :biggrin:

But, my whole house is wired with gigabit switches & capable cables. I only use wireless for surfing or downloading sometimes (internet is only 25mbps).
I tried that for a while, but 802.11g was just too limiting. I sometimes stream 1080p HD H.264 over WiFi, and at even a short distance 802.11g was consistently struggling. With 802.11n, it's still struggling at longer distances, but I've added additional 802.11n access points to compensate.

OTOH, when I have to transfer several GB of baby videos or whatever, I still need to plug it in. 802.11ac would eliminate that requirement in a lot of instances for me.
 
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sxr7171

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2002
5,079
40
91
At least with my 802.11n Macs and 802.11n Airport Extreme, I find wireless speeds to be fairly consistent when reasonably close to the router. The fluctuations in speed increase the further away I am from the router. IOW, not only do speeds decrease as you move away from the router, your so-called "flakiness" in speeds increases.

That said, Anand told us he can get 300-400 Mbps pretty consistently in iperf in rooms adjacent to the router. That's decent. In my house in my usage scenario that wouldn't be ideal, but I would be willing to augment with additional access points. Then we run into the problem of wireless handoffs not being handled well on consumer equipment, but I'd be willing to go to prosumer equipment with the Ubiquiti 802.11ac Unifi line.

I wouldn't do that this year, but would consider it later. In the meantime I'm just using 802.11n, for cost reasons... and also partially because 802.11ac isn't actually officially ratified yet. Maybe I'd wait until 2014 to get the second version of the 802.11ac MacBook Pro too.


I am optimistic that 10GigE for the home will be available and affordable by 2020. Why am I optimistic? Because it will run on a lot of existing CAT6 cabling. You may just have to reterminate. CAT6 is spec'd to run 10GigE up to 55 metres, and most runs in homes are under 40 metres, and in my (big) house nearly all are under 30 metres in fact. Actually, you could even make it work on lots of CAT5e installations. No, it's not in spec, but who cares in a home, as long as it works. BTW, Mellanox actually supported some of their 10GigE cards on CAT5e over short distances.

Why do I care? Cuz consumer NASes are limited to Gigabit Ethernet, so they max out at 100+ MB/s. You can get dual GigE NASes, but they are a problem to implement effectively in regular homes for various reasons, not the least of which is the fact that client equipment doesn't have dual GigE, and consumer switches can't handle it anyway.

10 GigE on NASes and client equipment would make things easy. Furthermore, by 2020, Terabyte SSDs will be common and affordable too.


I tried that for a while, but 802.11g was just too limiting. I sometimes stream 1080p HD H.264 over WiFi, and at even a short distance 802.11g was consistently struggling. With 802.11n, it's still struggling at longer distances, but I've added additional 802.11n access points to compensate.

OTOH, when I have to transfer several GB of baby videos or whatever, I still need to plug it in. 802.11ac would eliminate that requirement in a lot of instances for me.

Edit: AE replaced by Airport Express (not airport extreme).

What's a good AP that isn't crippled like the Airport Express? And do you know if I can configure them to work well with the Time Machine? The airport configuration utility makes configuring them together so easy. But I can configure them myself just the same with a 3rd party access point.
 
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el-Capitan

Senior member
Apr 24, 2012
572
2
81
I live in a densely populated area (I counted 68 WiFi networks in range). Even when using Apple .11n hardware exclusively, it is a challenge to get consistently above 5 MB/sec. Wired is the way to go for me.
 

alkemyst

No Lifer
Feb 13, 2001
83,769
19
81
Nope. It is very unlikely that wifi will have the reliability that Ethernet always had.

Engineers say otherwise. The model will be only backbone devices will tie via physical media.

I am not sure why you have issues with wireless being so flaky...however; there are many installs where they were not deployed correctly.

A proper wireless survey is very time consuming. Knowing the proper antennas and output power another matter.

Too many try to max out their power settings not realizing is actually slows down G/N when you do that.