![]() ![]() Under these conditions, the reference 802.11n router delivered TCP throughput of just 30.2 mpbs, but Belkin’s router achieved TCP throughput of 78.2 mbps?far better performance than Buffalo’s WZR-1800H managed. ![]() At this location, the router and client were 75 feet apart and separated by three insulated interior walls, and one insulated exterior wall clad on one side with fiber-cement lapboard. My second outdoor location was a picnic table situated completely outside my house. Here again, Belkin finished in last place, owing to its two-stream radio. ![]() In the real world, I doubt that anyone would try to set up a media bridge outdoors because dragging the bridge and finding an outlet (and likely an extension cord) are too inconvenient. The AC 1200 DB performed slightly better when I moved the client and the media bridge to the first of my two outdoor test locations?an exterior patio enclosed by three walls and one half wall with glass windows. As the chart below indicates, the AC 1200 DB’s TCP throughput dropped by nearly half in this location, but it still provided more than enough bandwidth to wirelessly mount and stream a Blu-ray ISO image of the movie Spiderman 3 from a Windows Home Server 2011 machine in my home office to a home-theater PC in the entertainment center, including its high-definition soundtrack. Since many people will want to connect the gear in their home entertainment system to an 802.11ac network, I decided to measure TCP throughput with the media bridge inside the built-in equipment cabinet in my home theater (the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall cabinet is constructed from cabinet-grade plywood, including the back). With TCP throughput of just 162 mbps, this 802.11ac router was even slower than the 802.11n Asus RT-N66U router I used as a reference point. The AC 1200 delivered disappointing 802.11ac performance at close range, with the client 9 feet away from the router and in the same room. To measure the router’s downlink TCP throughput, I set up the laptop as a server and used a desktop PC hard-wired to the router as the client. I used the open-source IPERF benchmark (and the JPERF Java graphical front end designed for it). To test the router, I positioned the client successively at five spots inside and outside a 2800-square-foot, ranch-style home (distances from the router are noted in each chart below). The Video Link closely resembles the router. To measure the router’s 802.11ac performance on the 5GHz frequency band, I obtained an engineering sample of Belkin’s new Video Link 802.11ac media bridge, which I connected to the AVADirect’s ethernet port. This was all the streaming I needed to evaluate the AC 1200’s 802.11n performance (on both the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz frequency bands). The Ultimate-N 6300 can send and receive three simultaneous 150-mbps spatial streams (450 mbps in total) most adapters are limited to handling two (300 mbps in total). I used an AVADirect laptop equipped with a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-3210M CPU, 4GB of memory, and an integrated Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 Wi-Fi adapter to run my benchmark tests. When I forced the 2.4GHz radio to combine two 20MHz channels to produce an 802.11n network with 40MHz of bandwidth, the router responded by earning two second-place finishes. The AC 1200 arrived from the factory with channel bonding disabled on its 2.4GHz radio but enabled on its 5GHz radio. Belkin clearly needs to improve Intellistream in order to make it useful and worthy of recommendation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the speed test to run to completion. But Belkin doesn’t allow you to configure any QoS settings manually Intellistream is supposed to do that for you automatically after you run a diagnostic speed test. QoS is supposed to shape your network traffic so that lag-sensitive applications such as games, media streaming, and VoIP receive higher priority than lag-insensitive apps such as BitTorrent downloads. The AC 1200 provides a DLNA-compliant media server, parental controls that let you block access to unseemly websites, and a rudimentary quality-of-service engine that Belkin dubs Intellistream. It also finished dead last at reading those files from the attached drive. I didn’t try to connect a USB printer, but the AC 1200 DB was much slower than the other 802.11ac routers at writing large files and small files to an attached USB hard drive. Belkin provides two USB 2.0 ports on the back of the router, to support network-attached storage and a shared printer. There is no provision for mounting the router on a wall. The AC 1200 DB has a vertical orientation, which should result in better range than routers that sit flat on a surface, even though its antennas are hidden inside its plastic enclosure. ![]()
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