Netgear 11ac

[Azalee Rowling]

Iam using a Netgear R6200 router with an A6200 usb adapter on Windows 8 64-bit in the 5GHz band, and it connects using 802.11n. I cannot find any options for using 802.11ac and in the A6200 WiFi Adapter properties I don't even see a reference to 802.11ac.

Does anyone know what I setting I need to change to get 802.11ac?

Since NETGEAR was vague about when review samples would be available for its brandie-new draft 802.11ac router, I put my pre-order in for two with Amazon. They arrived on Wednesday and I spent part of Thursday running some preliminary tests.

A full review will follow in the next week or so, after NETGEAR releases a rumored firmware release. But, given the interest in the product, I wanted to get some performance data up quickly so that early adopters can get a brain cramp trying to decide between Buffalo and NETGEAR.

The only thing in the draft 802.11ac technologies that might provide better range is standardized beam-forming, to replace the various incompatible methods used today. But this will help only when clients are introduced that implement the new beam-forming standard. There will be no improvement for current 802.11n devices. See Why 802.11ac Will Kill The 5 GHz Wi-Fi Band for more on this.

Now, if you are starting from an old 802.11g router and considering an upgrade, you will definitely see a throughput improvement if you also upgrade your clients to 802.11n. You may also see range improvement. But most range improvement is coming from the advances in wireless chip technology and improved receive sensitivity that have occured since 802.11g was the new kid on the wireless block.

And one more thing for those who are shocked, shocked (!) to find that the initial crop of draft 11ac routers have bugs and features missing from current-generation products. Get over it! These products are being rushed to market in hopes of proving how fashion-forward their makers are. Hell, the techology they are based on is still in draft form, so what do you expect?

The V1.0.0.68_1.0.16 firmware version you see in the above screenshot is what I used for testing. I checked on Thursday before testing and it was the latest. But I just happened to check again on Sunday as I write this and there is newer 1.0.0.90 version posted. But among its bugfixes is not the missing Guest wireless mode that some early buyers are pining for (or at least complaining about the lack thereof).

That fix is supposedly coming before the end of this week (June 8) according to NETGEAR, along with a fix for a "variable throughput issue" and "enhanced 802.11ac performance". As noted earlier, once NETGEAR releases that firmware and I have confirmed that there are no other performance tweaks coming in another week or so, I will retest everything for the full review.

Clicking the Setup bridge mode wireless setttings button brought up the screen shown below. There is no site survey function, so you need to know the SSID of the router you want to connect to. As shown, I used a WPA2/AES secured connection for testing.

I included the older ASUS router, even though it was tested with my old Intel 5300 two-stream client, mainly because one of the SNB Forum denizens insists that his R6300 provides broader coverage than his old RT-N56U.

Bottom line: Where the same test clients are used, i.e. the RT-N66U and WZR-D1800H, the RT-N66U has an advantage over the two draft 11ac routers only for strongest signal (Location A) downlink in 2.4 GHz and across most 5 GHz downlink locations.

So at least to me, neither the Buffalo nor NETGEAR draft 11ac routers are likely to provide a significant performance advantage (both range and throughput) for two-stream N clients over any other current-generation N router.

I use a Netgear A6210 USB adapter to do WiFi captures. Savvius OmniPeek has a driver to put it into promiscuous mode and it works well. It supports 802.11ac. Is there a way that Wireshark could be set up to support this adapter?

I'd prefer Windows. I'm working in a corporate environment where all the PC's have Windows on them. I could possibly get them to give me a dedicated laptop to use that I could convert over to Linux. I'm at Sharkfest and the development team have suggested I give npcap I try, which I plan to do as soon as I get back from this and have a chance to put it up on my secondary laptop.

Npcap has a feature called "Raw 802.11 Packet Capture": Npcap is able to see 802.11 packets instead of fake Ethernet packets on ordinary wireless adapters. You need to select the "Support raw 802.11 traffic (and monitor mode) for wireless adapters" option in the installation wizard to enable this feature.

Moreover, Npcap provides the WlanHelper.exe tool to help you switch to Monitor Mode on Windows. See more details about this feature in section "For software that use Npcap raw 802.11 feature" in the docs. See more details about radiotap here:

I'm going to try this. I have a question; how do I install this with Wireshark? Do I simply install Wireshark, decline when it asks me if I want to install winpcap and then install this driver after I'm done? Or should I install this driver first?

Hm. So I installed npcap 0.07 r17 and then installed Wireshark 2.0.4. I enabled "Raw 802.11 Packet Capture" but not the WinAPI compatibility mode. When I brought up Wireshark I told it to NOT install WinPcap. Upon actually starting the software it told me "Unable to load WinPcap (wpcap.dll); yuou will not be able to capture packets." I'm going to uninstall npcap and reinstall it using the WinAPI compatible mode to see if that works.

Unfortunately, not all old 2.4GHz, 802.11n devices will suddenly become faster. To enjoy the higher link rate, the client must also support 256-QAM. In some cases, this can be accomplished via a firmware update, if the manufacturer offers one.

The contest between the Netgear and Asus products was even tighter when each router was paired with a client connected to a Linksys WUSB710 802.11ac bridge. The two finished second and first, respectively, but the overall difference was a razor-thin 0.3 mbps this time.

The Asus RT-AC68U beat out the Nighthawk when tested with a client equipped with a Linksys WUSB6300 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter, but the Nighthawk was just 1.5 mbps slower. In fact, all the routers performed very well on this test, but the Netgear and Asus products have far superior feature sets.

The problem is these speeds are garbage. In the real world no-one ever gets close to theoretical speeds and the fastest 802.11ac real world speeds recorded in testing are around 720Mbps (90MBps). By contrast 802.11n tops out at about 240Mbps (30MBps) so the 3x estimate is still true, just much lower.

Long term 802.11ac has the headroom to support up to eight antennas each running at over 400Mbps each, but the fastest router to date only has four antennas. The reason is because antennas add cost and take up space and the smaller the device the less antennas they can fit so it becomes pointless adding more to a router. Typically:

This is another bottleneck. If your glorious four antenna 802.11ac router is connecting to your single antenna 802.11ac smartphone then 400Mbps (50MBps) is your theoretical maximum and 200Mbps (25MBps) is the more realistic one.

This is something of a downer, but these speeds are still faster than nearly all home broadband connections and only become a limitation for transferring files wirelessly between devices on your local network (say laptop to laptop or desktop to NAS).

All this means the performance of 802.11ac is maintained far better at long range than 802.11n. Peak performance may be tripled, but at range 5-10x the speed benefits are not unusual and this is where 802.11ac comes into its own. Some numbers for example:

Technology is a wonderful thing. 12 months ago 802.11ac equipment was hard to find and extremely expensive. Now it is built into every premium smartphone, tablet, laptop and smart TV and is increasingly found in midrange devices as well.

The reason for this is threefold. Firstly there are obvious performance benefits, particularly for single antenna devices like smartphones. Secondly it is more battery efficient because WiFi needs to be active for less time when data transfers can complete more quickly. Thirdly with proliferation comes scales of economy which bring down the price.

Where there is still a jump in price, however, is routers. Wireless AC routers still tend to have a 20-50% premium (depending on model), but as ageing routers risk becoming the speed and range bottleneck for every Internet connected item in your home these much neglected devices are worth a little more investment.

D-Link DWA-171 - $24 - there are faster dual antenna AC1200 USB dongles, but they are huge whereas the slower DWA-171 is so small you can leave it in a laptop at all times and it still delivers strong performance.

Thanks for the links Gabriel. The devices I would plug in to an ac router would be blu-ray player, apple tv, and a long run to a desktop in my office. wireless would be a couple iPhones and two laptops. The laptops are the most important to achieve better speeds on. So, with the wired of course I want 10/100/1000. I am looking at the netgear r7000 and then doing some research to see what usb adapters would work the best.

First thing you will notice, given that all of your components are all 802.11 G or N; and the only way you can get the AC is if you buy the adapter. Then right away the AC is going to be a bit of an overkill offering (just so you are aware upfront).

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