I don’t know much about antenna and antenna gain, but when comparing different SOHO wireless devices, the only parameter about wifi is the antenna gain:
RB951Ui-2HnD → 2.5
wAP → 2
hAP lite classic → 1.5
There are a lot of advance and confusing stuff about antenna gain out there but I just want to know how these numbers affect WiFi performance in 3 terms:
1- WiFi Range
2- WiFi Speed
3- Number of WiFi client device can handle
I will be thankful if someone can tell me how these 3 device differ in these 3 areas.
Forget about antenna gain, look at Sensitivity at MCS7 as a reference (also Transmit Power, but to a lesser extent, there’s no point on stations being able to “hear” the AP if the AP cannot “hear them” to begin with).
it has 7dB Sensitivity difference. Each 3dB means double, so it has more than quadruple better Sensitivity. So 951 will be able to “hear stations” 4x better than any of the other two.
it has 7dBm Tx Power, quadruple of the wAP/hap lite classic.
Thank you so much for detailed explanation. I wonder what is sensitivity? higher sensitivity is better or lower?
I had a RB951Ui-2HnD and just bought a hAP Lite for testing. I cleared all the configs and set both of them to 2GHz-only-G, and connected using a WiFi USB dongle next room. hAP connects at 18Mb and didn’t pass 500KB/s and RB951Ui connects at 36Mb and didn’t pass 1.3MB/s. I think even RB951Ui performs so bad considering just one room distance, I expected higher values. Now I wonder each user get 500KB/s or this is shared bandwidth?
When I switched to 2GHz-only-N, hAP becomes a mess, as connection dropped to 6Mb/s and speed didn’t pass 200KB/s with so much interruption. RB951Ui performs much better. It connects at 65Mb and transfer at 4MB with 20MHz bandwidth although still less than expected values.
I tested 802.11b for hAP, it performs even better than G, with speed of 600KB/s.
I want to setup a HotSpot with more than 10 user, and each user is not allowed to get more than 250KB/s, now:
1- 802.11G is more suitable for crowded environment than 802.11N, am I right?
2- RB951Ui-2HnD or wAP is better for this scenario (In another thread you mentioned wAP is for crowded enviroment)? (I believe hAP is off the chart as it has 7MB free ram with not clients)
I just see this:
54MBit/s
RB951Ui-2HnD: tx=25 / rx=-80
wAP | hAP: tx=18 / rx=-74
As hAP and wAP are exactly the same, I wonder why their antenna gain is different?
BTW, what is rx value? are lower values better?
higher sensitivity is better, i.e. -78 is better than -77.
First thing I’d do in your scenario is an spectral-history. Your signal Rx levels are horrible…
951Ui is great for a big space, as long as you place it strategically. wAPs are usually deployed on smaller venues, and instead of trying to cover one place with one AP, you use several of them, to “fill in” dark areas, lowering Tx power and deploying them strategically: eg on corridors, corners, etc.
Any of them can handle more than 10 stations, the more “level” stations signal/CCQ are, the better and more stations a given AP will be able to serve.
Bear in mind a radio works better when it serves stations using the same protocol, e.g. all N stations.
If the radio has to switch back and forth between different modes (b, g, N) and modulations to Tx to its stations, performance will be penaltied (physics).
So it is usually better practice to set it either only for N mode, or G/N if you have to serve G-only clients (should be rare).