 Got a very special treat for you guys. I've got four routers. I have a Zyxel NBG5715, I have a D-Link Amplify 1000 whole home router, I've got a Linksys E4200, and I have a Trendnet TEW692GR. I am going to be doing a range test with these four high end routers. I'm going to be using a reference. This is an old Netgear wireless G router, so don't judge Netgear based on their performance in this particular test. That's just as a reference, so if you have an old middle of the road router, but it's kind of old, then that should be a good reference point. Alright, so what's unique about each of these routers? Let's do a quick summary. So, the Zyxel one has a feature that's called beamforming to support extended coverage. What that basically means is it uses its three antennas, one, two, three, in order to focus the transmission to where your devices are and extend the effective coverage. Now, the D-Link whole home Amplify branded router uses six antennas and D-Link's patented version called SmartBeam, which allows it to, in theory, according to D-Link, provide pretty much the best coverage you can get. This is a 300 megabit per second router. This is a 450 megabit per second concurrent dual band router. The Trendnet one here, the 692GR, doesn't have that SmartBeam stuff, so that's going to be a reference for a high end dual band concurrent 450 megabit per second router that does not have that technology. And finally, we've got the Cisco E4200, which is, well, okay, Links is E4200, which, I mean, come on, it's Cisco. It's their high end router right now. Let's see how it compares. What I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be taking this tablet right here and I am going to be walking around to three different reference points around my property and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take readings and I'm going to, it's going to be approximate a little bit, guys. This is not perfect science. I'm going to take readings on both the 2.4GHz wireless network, as well as the 5GHz wireless network and let you guys know how it's going to go. For all of the routers, I am using their maximum transmit power. I am going to be using channel 6 for wireless and 2.4GHz and there's a reason I'm doing that. The reason is there is one other network in my neighborhood using channel 6. We're going to see how it performs when there's one low signal strength network that's interfering a little bit. These are both me. I have two routers on right now. Don't worry, I won't be doing that during the test. And then 5GHz, I am going to be using the default, which is let it find its own frequency and see how well it can perform at 5GHz with no interference, letting it pick its own transmission speed. So I'm going to show you guys all the different places where I'm going to test from and yeah, let's see how this goes. Alright, the routers have their firmware updated, so here we go. We're going to do the baseline first. That is the Netgear model. And so baseline reading shows us that yes, the Netgear router is very strong. I also want to talk a little bit about the rating system here. So we can see these are rated in decibels from minus 40 to minus 100, with this being better. So every approximately 3 decibels represents a halving of the transmission and receiving power. Okay guys, so if it falls down to minus 43, 1, 2, 3 here, that means it's about half as strong as minus 40. If it falls down to minus 50, that means it is 1 tenth as strong as minus 40. So I want you guys to bear that in mind. Minus 50 is 1 tenth as strong as minus 40. Minus 60 is a tenth as strong as that, or 100th as strong as this. Minus 70 is another tenth of 60, 80th of 70, and so on and so forth. So 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000, a million. So this is actually a million times less strong than that, according to my quick math, which might be wrong. But you guys get the point? Okay, so it's a factor of 10 every time we go 10 of these. Alright, let's go. So baseline reading a meteor away from the router is obviously good, but let's go to the guest bedroom, and I'll show you guys where I'm going to put the tablet when I take my measurements in here. Alright, so I'm going to put the tablet right here, and fire up WiFi and analyzer. Now, this test isn't going to be perfect. You guys are going to have to rely on me to approximate in a way that is meaningful and representative of the facts, because here's the reality of it. When we look at the Netgear router here, you can see it moves around a lot. So between minus 70 here and minus 80 has already occurred, which means that that's a ten times difference just between those two lines. So all my other routers are off. These are just neighboring routers that are interfering right now. All of my neighbors are off, so that means that actually this one of my neighbors is stronger than the Netgear one through about four walls between my guest bedroom and the computer room there. So this is where the tablet will sit when I take this particular reading, and I will not stand between it and the router. I'll let it stabilize a little bit, and then I'll probably provide a range. So based on looking at this, I would say somewhere in the... You know what? It might just be... Here, now that I'm not standing in the way anymore, I can probably just say minus 70 for that. Fixed climbing, I might do a range. Sorry, guys. I know this is kind of dragging on. Yeah, I'll probably just say minus 70 for that, or minus 70 to minus 65. Our next test location is going to be down in the garage, because that is somewhere that I often use my tablet. We got some interesting props being made down here right now for the NCIX Christmas party. Okay, moving over here. Okay, in the garage. Over here, going over to my racket string machine, where I often put a tablet so I can watch videos. So this, with me standing right here, because there's not a whole lot of other room for me, this is where it will go for the garage test. So I'm just going to do the reference score for the Netgear router here, let things stabilize a little bit. Wow, there's a lot of different potentially interfering Wi-Fi networks down here. So that will help evaluate the routers in some way, I would imagine. Okay, so since we've been down here, for this one I'm probably going to say something like, let's maybe wait for one or two more ticks here. But this one looks an awful lot like minus 60 to me. Yep, we're going to go with minus 60 for that one. Alright, we're off to the next destination, and that is outside. Yes, the great outdoors, the gamers worst enemy, unless it's beautifully rendered DirectX 11 outdoors. Okay, so we're going outside and it's raining, so let me just get my umbrella going here. Okay, there we go. So, we're going to go all the way out to the back of my property. You guys aren't going to be able to see a freaking thing for this part of the video, but that's okay. You'll just have to kind of trust me and see the pretty graph. Although I'm not going to hold the tablet out there too much because, yeah, it's raining and stuff. And right now I'm holding a camera, a tablet, my notepad, and an umbrella, and trying not to drop any of them because they're all valuable and stuff. Okay, so we're, oh yeah, let's go to the shed. That's perfect because that way I can actually put the tablet somewhere. So my house is over there, okay. That's the guest bedroom right in the middle of the frame right now you guys. So that should give you some idea how much further away we are now. It's probably about another, I'd say we're about another 15 meters away. So maybe about 45 feet for the Americans in the audience. Okay, there we are, dropping the umbrella. So, I'm going to put it right on the corner of this workbench and we are going to see, ha ha, so we saw what happened to the wireless signal as we moved away from the house and we can see that for all intents and purposes it's pretty much crap from here, which is actually exactly what I was hoping because this is meant to be our reference and then we're going to see if powerful new routers can punch through the distance and space between my house and my shed and deliver a good wireless routing experience. So we're going to call that about minus 85 now that I've actually put it down and watched a couple ticks. So what I'm going to do guys is now I'm going to take these measurements for all these different routers and I will present the results at the end. It will be time consuming but you guys are worth it. So I'm going to try and keep this reasonably short but it's going to be pretty difficult. Let me start off by saying that I beat up this sort of old, I call it old a lot of times, this Netgear router at the very beginning of this but, so what is this, the WGR614V7. Okay, so this little router showed up for the fight and in spite of it's one antenna, so this is a three antenna model, three antennas, six internal antennas, no idea but it's got internal antennas and according to Linksys they're pretty beast. G router, so this is an N450 megabit concurrent dual band, 450 megabit concurrent dual band, 450 slash 300 dual band and a 300 megabit single band, wireless G single band. Okay, let's go through some numbers here. So computer room, guest bedroom, garage and backyard shed, those are my four columns. Okay, so the Netgear router gave us baseline readings of about, let's, okay remember, higher numbers are worse, the lower number the better the reception was, okay guys. So that means that minus 40 here, that's kind of a baseline, okay. So then we're somewhere in the 65 to 70 range, 60 in the garage and 85 at the backyard shed. At the end of it all, this was actually one of the best scores posted in the backyard shed. The Linksys E4200, actually you know what, let's go computer room first, let's do it that way, we'll go column by column. So in the computer room, the strongest baseline reading was the whole home router from D-Link, actually no, it was the 692GR from Trendnet, only on its 2.4 gigahertz band though. What's weird is it was significantly worse on its 5 gigahertz band and this trend continued throughout the entire test. So that's, the only consistent score that was best was the whole home router at minus 25. The Linksys E4200 was at about minus 48, minus 30. This trend also continued the whole time, the 2.4 gigahertz band not performing nearly as well on the E4200 as the 5 gigahertz band. So the winner in the computer room, I'm gonna go ahead and give it to the D-Link whole home router. Remember that's the one that has the multiple antennas that detect where you are and then orient their wireless coverage to best suit you. In the guest bedroom, the far and away winner was the whole home router from D-Link, the DIR645. So remember, minus 54 compared to let's say the Linksys E4200s best score of minus 62 is almost 10 times better than minus 62 which is the 5 gigahertz band and is 100 times better than minus 74 on the 2.4 gigahertz band to give you guys some context for that number. So all the other ones are in that like one tenth the strength of the whole home router here. However, when we get down to the garage, it loses that lead. So about three decibels is about double. It's double. So what that means is that the E4200's 2.4 gigahertz band now scores double as well as the whole home router's 2.4 gigahertz band. Remember this is a single band router so there's no getting away from interference. So this might work really well in a large home in like suburbia but if you were in a condo, this would not be the best solution because it doesn't have dual band so you're going to have to fight with all those other people with their old cheap routers. See I keep beating this up but it performed really really well. Look at this. It actually gave up the best score in the garage. So anyway, yeah. By old I just mean 2.4 gigahertz running on those same frequencies that are very crowded. So that's what it will have to compete with. So my hypothesis about this guy, the 645, is that at a moderate range it is able to align itself to perform as you can see here dramatically better than the static orientation of their wireless zones routers. However, as we get further away, it really drops off. One of the other things I also did observe about this number is that while this is a little bit lower than some of the other routers, it was always very consistent. So where with most of these routers I was looking at a graph that sort of went something like this and then I'm just kind of taking an average line for you guys here. The whole home router was usually like that. Very very steady. These numbers are 100% absolute at these locations which is very interesting. Okay, so in the garage, yes, the big winner was the old Netgear router, the G router. However, okay, something to bear in mind here too though guys, is that compared to let's say the Linksys C4200 where we have got about half the signal strength in the garage on the 5 gigahertz band, we're talking wireless N for 50 megabit per second. We're talking if your tablet is wireless N, this is probably still going to give you better speed than ancient wireless G, 54 megabit per second with a better signal strength. So just because you have an old router, just because your signal strength is strong doesn't mean your data transfer rate is actually the best. That's something I'll probably want to investigate a little bit later though I just didn't have time tonight. So let's go to the backyard shed. The only routers that really passed this test were the Netgear router and the D-Link DIR645. The other routers failed it on at least one of their bands which means they dropped below minus 100. So the E4200 just barely hung in there on its 5 gigahertz band. It managed to hold a line at minus 95 and I was like okay I guess. You probably can't even browse the web at that kind of signal strength. And then the Zyxel and the Trendnet routers on their 2.4 gigahertz bands were able to achieve above minus 90. Once again though, they looked like this. You're probably not even browsing the web at that kind of signal strength. So okay I'm going to go through the graph one more time. Netgear, Linksys, D-Link, Zyxel, Trendnet, computer room, guest bedroom, garage, backyard shed. These are the numbers. When I've split the column that means I'm looking at the two bands separately 2.4 and 5 gigahertz. So you can see I've done that. So I just want the camera to go and have a, oh okay come look at me, and then go have a close look at the graphs. If you guys want to pause that and just kind of look at it in detail, I think there's some interesting information here. At the end of the day though, what we've come down to is that advances in antenna technology are not really moving that far ahead. Unless we look at specific cases like the DIR645 where at moderate ranges and even at extreme ranges we were able to achieve a much more steady signal even though when we got to slightly further away distances it wasn't necessarily a stronger signal than the others, just more steady. So thank you for checking out this little roundup. I hope you guys found it useful. 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