we see lot of post of people discussing “bad Wifi” or “Wifi problem” or “What Wifi throughput/range do you get with that Mikrotik device” etc.
Often the only way they can test connection is doing an “Ookla” type of speed test (which says nothing about the Wifi speed or quality).
Or other tests that do not provide much Wifi related information…
The “normal” Mirkotik user will not have the set up needed to do iperf testing of the “WIFI link”.
When one asks on the forum “What is your Wifi speed” the other forum members will not have time to do such tests on their end neither
On the other hand, I would love to help and give some numbers to others if its fast and simple to do. I do have tons of devices at home running. If I could quickly do some speed/range tests on them I could help others more easily. Like 2x2 5Ghz throughput on Audience, or 4x4 5Ghz throughput on this device, or with that phone etc…
Which brings me to the conclusion why I wrote this post: (and my question)
Could we add a throughput test option into the TIkk-APP?
(or another way of simply testing Wifi from phone or tablet directly to the router without using 3rd party attached devices…)
This would greatly improve the way you can optimise and test your Wifi network, coverage etc…!
Maybe its only me thinking about this…???
These kind of testings are subject to cpu power, while you want to test network performance. Therefor I don’t need it. The bandwidth test is not sufficient for you?
I think the issue is you can not run Bandwidth test server from a mobile device to the AP…
With an Samsung S10 under Andoird iperf or Chariot end point (you can use any other wifi6 enabled phone too)
you can get 900mbps TCP Wifi throughput towards a recent Wifi6 AP (not with Mikrotik unfortunately) in near range.
Now if you get 600mbps with the S10 you have an issue!!! How the hell will you know at the speed level if you have issues
or not? You must be able to test this somehow reliably.
You have tons of options like AMPDU settings, HW retries, setting channel as eCee or XX in 80/160 mode and more
freaky ROS Wifi settings people play along to get “better” Wifi, while in the end they will never do a really correct speed test.
(and those parameter tuning provides only limited perf. increase…).
I might have a dream here, but from looking at the forum and all its Wifi questions to me it is clear:
have simple Wifi test tool on the mobile that works with the AP bandwidth server would make sens
(the max speed able to test would indeed depend on the CPU of the AP (MIPS, ARM, etc.))
Maybe as you say its not possible but I have not seen yet comments that would really justify why things can not be improved…
Maybe all one can do is do a good WIKI entry about how to do iperf3 Wifi test system setup (not using the bandwidth server) in the most simplest way
and which can be used on mobile devices (and any other device too!) ?
Actually thinking about it, i might do something like that write a forum entry to start something off… but don’t know when I will have time
In that case isn't bandwidth test subjected to CPU power as well?
As WeWiNet wrote, a simple speed test would be enough, server side on Mikrotik, client on the App or vice versa.
Running as a bandwidth test server needs CPU itself that otherwise could be used for main tasks i.e. routing, bridging, firewalling etc. The idea is that you most probably won't see top performance using the same device as a test server AND for processing traffic as well.
For example, I can't (always) hit gigabit testing with BT running on RB3011 while it doesn't have any problem with processing
gigabit traffic when I test with iperf3 running on a server in LAN.
I understand the limitation of CPU power on the router IF you really get high throughput!
But 2 things are lowering the CPU issue:
You often want to test speed at mid/far range, then throughput is not that high.
Max Wifi speed with Mikrotik is not that high neither/nor CPU limited.
Indeed you might not be able to run firewall and routing in parallel to max Wifi speed on all type of Mikrotik devices, but
ARM devices should be able to cope with quite some throughput. And a device like RB4011 has even more horse power.
I just did a quick rb4011 4x4 and audience 5G 4x4 iperf3 test with a raspberry 4 iperf3. ROS 6.46.6
The max speed I get on rb4011 :
MacPro 3x3 11ac : 510Mbps TCP with peaks of 580mbps
Android Phone 2x2 11ac: 400Mbps TCP with peaks around 450mbps
Used 80Mhz as non of my clients support 160Mhz.
The CPU load on my fully setup Audience is 95% of one core and the others at 25%.
The Wifi driver is 45-50% of that 95% on that single core.
And I used the RB4011 factory reset, no firewall in the bridge. Pretty much same Wifi performance
than audience, is just a bit better in 10% range than audience (but could also be the 4 ext. antennas of rb4011).
All this was close range like 2 meters away from the AP…
For measurements in remote locations like garden, kitchen, cave etc. you do not get high Wifi throughput
and CPU load could be neglectable leaving enough CPU for some bandwidth test application.
The tikApp on android (I assume same on Apple) can already “download” file like suppout or config from Router to mobile device itself.
If we could just get at the end of the file download a speed indication (average bits/second, file size and download time) we would have
one tool to test rudimentary 'WIFI" speeds of clients across locations in home…
Its almost there… Little things needed to make it happen.
(and finally a good use case of an app which is neither really usable as a pro tool, neither as a consumer tool)
