Summary: In case you are buying a new router, go for 2 important features,
Dual Band and Giga bit WAN and LAN ports.
For nearly 6-7 years, I have been using Belkin Basic router. This was meeting my requirement.
Recently ACT fibernet gave a offer of 300 Mbps for promo. To my surprise I was getting only 40-50 Mbps. That triggered me to find out why.
Here are my findings:
1. Router could handle only 100 Mbps. That means even though WAN is 300 Mbps, I can only use 100 Mbps or even less practically.
2. Further, WIFI is 2.4GHz and the channels are heavily used resulting in interference. This further reduced the data transfer throughput.
Wifi Analyser screen shot looked like this:
Inspite of choosing a channel manually, throughput was not great.
3. Even if you change the router, it may not help. This is because, your wifi card/ ethernet port on the desktop or laptop should support Gigabit.
4. I also found a configuration in router that could reduce the throughput. That configuration is Firewall in the router. Firewall in the router checks for every packet that arrives. Unless the packet checker is hardware accelerated, can severely hamper the bitrate. If you switch off the firewall in the router, you could immediately get a better performance. (I need to check if this can be switched off permanently)
5. Another thing I noticed was the ethernet cable. I had almost 2 similar ethernet cables but one gave higher throughput.
So, along with new router you would need total end-to-end support for higher speed.
a. WAN port of the router,
b. LAN port of the router
c. 2.4 GHz and 5GHz dual band
d. Mother board supporting Giga bit ethernet
e. Router configuration for high speed
f. Good ethernet cable.
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