burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

My old router was much slower. The NETGEAR AC1900 R7000 is great. I get the full 115 Mbps Internet download speed on my iPhone via a 5 GHz channel.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I'm going to have to try some transfers with the new router, just for kicks & giggles.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Bill, I’m guessing you’re running 802.11AC which has a theoretical max speed of 1300 mb/sec, but what do you actually benchmark it at using an ap such as Ookla?

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

See below. I’m 50 feet away from the router on a lower floor, on my iPhone.

I get about the same result on the iMac, whether on 1000-base-T wired, or WiFi.

(Download)

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

For me, the wired connection benchmarks just over 300 Mb/sec and Wi_Fi to my IPad or IPhone averages about 75 -80Mb/sec which is probably limited by both my WiFI router and the IPad and IPhone itself. I have an extra hop since I don’t use the built in Wi_Fi in the modem but run a CAT5 cable to a Wi_Fi router at the other end of the house. I could change to a faster WiFI router, but I doubt it would make much difference as the IPads or IPhones are probably the limiting factor. Where speed is important for my main computers and printers, I run them wired.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Understood. The iPhone 7 and later certainly keep up with our Spectrum Internet. Our service is nominally 100 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up, but typically runs at the numbers shown above, as read on all devices with browsers. It slows down a tiny bit during prime time, but not enough to notice. We can watch a couple of Netflix/Amazon Prime movies on different TVs, and surf the web with no issues. Before installing the Netgear router, that was NOT the case. Buffering was a daily annoyance.

The Arris sb6121 cable modem is capable of 343 Mbps by specification.

The modem is connected to the Netgear AC1900 R7000 router with a 1000Base-T Ethernet circuit. Both devices are 1000Base-T capable.

The router can transmit at 600 Mbps on 2.4 GHz and 1300 Mbps on 5 GHz WiFi.

So... whatever comes in via cable, goes out via WiFi on 5 GHz or wired. The download speed on the 2.4 GHz WiFi seems to be limited to about 102 Mbps. Upload is the same on both frequencies.

So I don't worry about wireless printing. I've never had any issues with it here at the house, with just a couple of printers. Business environments may vary, though, and if I had a room full of printers all running at the same time, I'd want them all on an intelligent, managed, Gigabit Ethernet switch.

In fact, that's what we had a decade ago in the school portrait lab... all the PCs to run 40 mini-labs, four wide-format Epsons, a mix of 19 Fargo, Pebble, Eltron, and Polaroid dye-sublimation ID card printers, a NexPress, two Konica-Minolta color copiers with high speed Fiery RIPS, a Durst Lambda 30" silver halide printer...

All that stuff was connected to a big Microsoft SQL database-driven Kodak DP2 system with 70+ TB of storage and a gigabit Ethernet system using 10 Cisco switches, strategically placed throughout the lab. We had over 100 PCs on that network. Response times were minimal. Once any printer rendered the first image and started printing, it ran at full speed, never waiting for more data. We could send a very large job to a printer, and it would run full speed (600 8x10s per hour) until it ran out of 500' of paper in each magazine.