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8×8 MIMO Wi-Fi 6 Range Testing with the Ruckus R730

I wanted to test if the additional MIMO radio chains on a Wi-Fi 6 Access Point improve speed at distance even for a 2×2 MIMO Wi-Fi client like a smartphone. I setup a Ruckus R730 802.11ax Access Point with zonedirector firmware 10.3 using a external power supply for full 8×8 capability on a clear 80Mhz channel at 5Ghz. This is currently the highest capacity Wi-Fi 6 AP on the market.

Next I placed a Samsung Galaxy S10 at my 50 foot indoor test location running a iperf server app. Here are the results I saw an average of 200Mbps throughput with spikes to 230Mbps and lows of 150Mbps.

When we compare this to my test with the EnGenius 4×4 Wi-Fi 6 EWS377AP where we saw a 160Mbps average at the same location we can see those additional radio chains do not go unused. We saw a 40Mbps bump in single client performance with the Ruckus R730! Some of this can be attributed to the beamflex antenna elements I am sure.

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Wi-Fi 6 Access Point Client Speed at Range Testing

To continue with my real world Wi-Fi 6 testing series with the EnGenius EWS377AP I wanted to do some indoor speed at distance tests. I am testing actual throughput using a iperf client on a GbE wired desktop and a iperf server app on the smartphone.

I first tested the Wi-Fi 6 Samsung Galaxy S10e I placed it 50 feet from the EWS377AP the Wi-Fi was passing through several walls furniture etc here are the results. I saw average of 160Mbps with spikes to to 176Mbps. Plenty of throughput to stream netflix at 4k (25Mbps) or do just about anything else over Wi-Fi.

Next I wanted to see the difference with a Wi-Fi 5 client the iPhone Xs. I placed the iPhone in the same position an reran the throughput test. This time we averaged 150Mbps with spikes up to 159Mbps.

So in real world distance testing a Wi-Fi 6 AP / Wi-Fi 6 Client edges out Wi-Fi 6 AP / Wi-Fi 5 client with a gain of ~10Mbps not as drastic as the 200Mbs difference we saw at 5 feet but still an improvement. And as we saw in our Wi-Fi 6 AP vs Wi-Fi 5 AP testing having a Wi-Fi 6 AP like the EnGenius EWS377AP can improve overall speed for all Wi-Fi devices.

To back up the Wi-Fi 6 AP testing I went back and did the same test with a Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) AP a 4×4 MIMO Ruckus R720. Here are the are the results at the same location.

First I tested the Wi-Fi 5 client the iPhone Xs I was only able to average about 35Mbps.

Next I tested the Samsung Galaxy S10 the Wi-Fi 6 client this did better at 65Mbps average.

So in conclusion we see a big speed at range improvement with a Wi-Fi 6 AP even with a Wi-Fi 5 client we saw over 100Mbps throughput improvement over a similar Wi-Fi 5 AP!

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Intel unveils its first 10th-gen laptop CPUs all with Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax)

Intel released the details of their 10th generation ice lake CPU’s today and they all come with gig + Wi-Fi 6! We should start to see these hitting the market very soon Dell and Acer have already announced laptops based on this new chipset.

Another reason to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 and get ready for the onslaught of devices with faster better Wi-Fi. We have the 4×4 Wi-Fi 6 EWS377AP and the 2×2 Wi-Fi 6 EWS357AP in stock today.