Range of wireless n signal

[ArisVer]

At what range (2.4 GHz) would you classify a signal as bad, acceptable and good? Does the transfer speed of the device matters?

 

[azazel1024]

It depends would be my answer.

Yes, it sort of depends on the device. On my phone, so long as what I am trying to do works fluidly, it is fast enough and there for it is acceptable/good. With my laptop or tablet, both vary, though the distance is roughly the same that I'd consider it good, acceptable or bad.

In terms of actual distance, it wholely depends on your setup. If you live in a concrete block house, one room over might move you to acceptable and two rooms over bad. In a large open concept house with 2x4" construction and sheetrock, you might be on the otherside of the house and still have good performance.

Outside you could be 5x further away and still have good performance*.

Generally on a smart phone I'd consider anything over about 20Mbps down and 5Mbps up to be good performance for almost anything I want to do and around 10Mbps down and 2Mbps up to be acceptable. On my tablet I'd consider anything less than 50Mbps down/up to be only acceptable and anything less than 30Mbps to be bad.

On my laptop I'd consider anything less than 200Mbps to be acceptable and less than 100Mbps to be bad.

Of course they all have different adapters capable of different base speeds, but I also do rather different things on all of them.

*Example, across my house with a TP-Link WDR3600 to my laptop, I could get 30Mbps on 2.4GHz. That is 3 walls and around 45ft of distance. Outside on a different WDR3600 which has the antennas run outside, I can get around 30Mbps of performance. On my phone. 80ft away. I haven't tried on my laptop that far away, but on my tablet I can get about 50Mbps at that distance and based on the different levels of performance, I could probably get around 80Mbps on my laptop.

Of course inside that WDR3600 is set to 40MHz 2.4GHz operation and the outdoor WDR3600 is set to 20MHz operation. If I set the outdoor one to 40MHz, I'd probably roughly double the performance.