5GHz antenna?

Probably a stupid question, but I couldn't find any information about it.
I'd like to swap the wireless card of my Lenovo E520 notebook (yes, I know I need to flash a modded bios to avoid whitelisting) with one that supports 5GHz band. I've checked Lenovo site and the notebook only came with two wlan options, both limited to 2,4GHz. So how could I tell if the antennae support 5GHz? Google hasn't helped me.
Thanks.

 

It should work just fine with the antenna you already have.
If if turns out I think somehow doesn't, let me say know and we'll proceed from there but I don't think it's going to be necessary.

 

All antennas are the same and even if you flip the cables (black one connected to white port and white cable to the black port) wifi will work fine. Only very limited number of laptops (mostly Samsungs) have one antenna cable on the top case (aux) and main antenna in LCD back cabinet. Pretty much any other laptop has either 1,2 or 3 antenna cables in LCD back cabinet. Antennas themselves will work with any wifi card, card simply need to be compatible with the laptop itself.

 

Thanks guys. I'll decide what to buy and I'll let you know how it goes then. I really liked the idea of a 3x3 card, but I wouldn't like to give up on Bluetooth (not to talk about having to route a third antenna through the whole laptop to the back of the LCD...). I think I'll go for an Intel N 6235.

 

I've found a cheap Intel 6235, but it's Dell branded. That should be no problem, right?

 

Lenovo eh. First check if there is a wif white-list,
get a lenovo barnded~ hp branded may work but they cost the same so don't brother. Dell one probably wont work.

 

There IS wifi whitelisting, indeed, but I'm going to flash a modded bios to avoid whitelisting.
Given the non-whitelisting bios, will the Dell card work?

Edit: I mean, of course my laptop with the new bios won't reject the Dell card, but I wonder if a branded card rejects other brand laptops.

 

With a Dell branded, windows may not able to start the wifi card.

They pretty much cost the same so grab a lenovo one.

 

Ok, I finally installed the third antenna and a Lenovo 6300 card.
The problem is: lan speed is slower than before!
It's about 4MB/s and the link speed is unstable (between 110 and 216 Mbps). Already tried different drivers (both Lenovo and Intel), different OS (Ubuntu, XP, win7). I also tried to remove the third (new) antenna, but the link speed went even lower, while actual transfer speed remains about the same.
What could be the issue?
Thanks.

 

What router is it and what is the distance from the router?

 

It's an Asus RT-N66U. I tried to stay very close to the router but nothing changed.

 

Excuse the dumb question but are you sure that you are connected to 5GHz network? If both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks have the same SSID, change one so that you could easily tell them apart.

As for connection speeds - 110mbps is actually impossible to achieve as connection speed - was it 108mbps by any chance?
216mbps is on the other hand possible to achieve only with 40 MHz channels which indicates that you are indeed operating at 40MHz channels width which is what we are looking for.


Install this app (free one) and check the signal quality, strength and if there are any networks with channels overlapping with the one you're using.
If in doubt - post a screenshot.

 

I'm now on the 2.4GHz network, which isnt't crowded here. However, the same behaviour occurs on the 5GHz network.

When I said 110Mbps I was actually uncertain what the exact number was, but it wasn't very different from 110.

I'm sure about 216 though. I have 40MHz (channel bonding) enabled on the router, indeed.

With my previous wi-fi card (which was 1x1) I used to connect at 150Mbps, as was to be expected. And the link was very stable at 150Mbps.
Now with the 6300 the link speed is fluctuating (and not so higher than before, sometimes lower).

Here's a screenshot of inSSIDer:

 

These networks shouldn't be an issue but it is theoretically possible that other 2.4GHz devices are an issue here (cordless phones, child monitors, Bluetooth etc all use 2.4GHz band) so you may want to try another channel at the other side of spectrum just to be certain that is not interference.

Another possibility is that drivers are an issue - either the version itself or the settings. Make sure that no energy saving settings are enabled either in Windows power-profile or in an advanced tab in card properties (available through device manager).

 

I've tried other channels, different driver versions, different driver settings, even different operating systems, to no avail.
Perhaps could it be anything wrong with the router?

 

I don't see how - it seems to be OK on the router side. Your previous card had not stability problems and signal strength is very good. Also this is a good router to begin with.

Do you have any other wireless devices to test so that we could definitely rule out the router?

 

I only have 1x1 wlan devices.
I'd need to find another laptop with a half-mini PCIe slot, to try my wifi card.

 

I wouldn't be too bothered with the link speed to be honest. Do some real throughput check, heck even speedtest.net is good enough if you only use internet and not much local network activity.

I have had atheros card happily report 300mbps even though it is far away from the router and giving the same real throughput as a intel card.

 

I already did real lan tests. As I said, I can't go past 4-5MB/s, towards a gigabit ethernet desktop. Which is pretty much the same (if not slightly slower) than what I used to see with my old 1x1 card.

 

Could it be that stock antennas are a bit crappy and can't transfer more data?

 

Not really. Antennas are most likely not at fault.

 

That's on the 2.4ghz band,right.

The 216 Mbps is what I used to get on the 2.4ghz band when I used an Intel 6300 or Killer 1103 paired with a WNDR4500,R6300 and R7000 router.

If you have a 450 Mbps dual band router or AC router you should be able to achieve a theoretical link speed of 450 Mbps on the 5ghz band with selected channel and proper router/wireless card settings.

 

Thanks WhatsThePoint. What was your actual transfer rate, if you know? Because I wouldn't care about the theoretical link speed if actual speed were good, but it's only 4-5MB/s...
I read of people reaching 15MB/s, which infact is to be expected with a 3x3 card and router.
I'll try again with the 5GHz band, though.

 

With AC 66u and 6300 about 20ft with 2 dry wall on 5ghz, I get 7-8M/s in iperf with link speed @ 175mbps.

If next to router, I believe it get to somewhere around 13M/s.

In my environment, 40mhz 2.4ghz is impossible.

 

Thanks baii. Could you please test the 2.4GHz band, even with 20MHz?

Also, I forgot to say I tested with FTP too (to rule out Samba slowness), but it's the same.

 

At link rate 130mbps, I can get 6-7MB/s

 

Thanks. I need to retry at 5GHz.

 

I'm back with this Intel 6300 card and its poor results.
I've checked the link speed and it varies between 156, 173, 175, 195, 217 Mbps. Not 216 as I said. Are these values compatible with a 3x3 40MHz setup?

Also, I've tested the 5GHz transfer rate and... it's lower than the 2.4GHz! About 2MB/s with a maximum link speed of 300Mbps (but not stable).

 

Wirelss is influenced by many things, 5 GHz signals attenuate much faster than 2.4 GHz, so if you are far from the router and you have walls between you and the router it's not impossible that 5 GHz will give you so-so results.

 

I know, but I was at inches from the router. And there are no other 5GHz networks around.
Also, the 2.4GHz isn't crowded either:
I can rule out "environtemtal" issues.

 

These values are all possible with three streams but only when the channel width is 20MHz! Since the router seems to be working in 40MHz mode, it's the card that seems to be defusing to 20Mhz channel. That said, your transfer speeds are too low for the indicated link speed anyway.

 

Thanks. I'll have a look at the card's settings, even though I think I had already tried.

 

It looks like the 2.4 connectivity is set to 20MHz by default. I've turned it to "Auto" and I now see link speeds of 300 or 270 Mbps.
The effective throughput is about 6MB/s, which is better than the previous 4MB/s but still low. I'll try to test it very close to the router but I already have -42dBm here where I'm now trying. What else could I check to improve throughput? I've tested all the other advanced settings of the wifi card and there's nothing more.

 

-42dBm is not great at all. I'm not saying it's bad either but if you are close to the router you should be looking at something like -28 to -32dBm.

EDIT: Although all things considered you should get more than 6MB/s anyway. How do you measure the throughput?

 

I have -42 quite far from the router. When I'm next to it I have about -20.

I measure the throughput by transferring (samba) a large file from a gigabit ethernet desktop.
I've also tried three parallel file copies and the maximum in that way is 8MB/s.
What's a safer way of testing?

The router is an Asus RT-N66U. Tomorrow I'll also search if there are known problems with it (maybe firmware related).

 

8 MB/s wired-wireless? You should definitely be getting at least 15 MB/s.

The RT-N66U is a pretty decent router, if there are firmware updates, you might want to do those.

 

It also really depends on your network card. The Intel 6300 is pretty crappy at 5Ghz performance.

 

Try using TeraCopy, when you expand the window to show details of the transfer, the windiw will stay open after the transfer is done and will show an average transfer speed calculated after the fact (as opposed to what Windows is showing).

Well, not "at least" 15MB/s, more like 15MB/s period. Anything more tan that is being very optimistic. Not that it's impossible but very few people will see that speed. 15MB/s is a pretty god benchmark for this though.

Not nearly that crappy. 6MB/s one way is barely over what 150mbps connection (single stream) can do and way below what 300mbps can, so even if it's not the best card out there that throughput is atrocious.

 

I think our routers (I have an RT-N66U) share the same wireless driver. May I ask you which firmware you are running and if you ever noticed differences in wireless throughput (I know older firmwares had a higher range, but I haven't heard about throughput) between different firmwares? I currently run RMerlin 374.40 firmware.
Thanks.

TeraCopy confrims the avarage transfer rate is 5,8MB/s.

 

I had used an Intel 6300 and a Killer 1103 both with the 3rd antenna attached before moving to 802.11ac.

Link Speed:2.4ghz = 300Mbps,5ghz = 450Mbps

In inSSIDer version 3 the 2.4ghz band would almost always have a 10dBm better connection strength but the time graph would show large dBm drops and a Link Score in the 40s
While the 5ghz band would have the 10 dBm higher connection strength near -40dBm from 25' and 2 walls it's link score was always at 100 with a time graph nearly a straight line.
The same holds true now with a mini pcie Intel AC-7260 in the notebook I'm currently using.

If I remember correctly the Intel 6300 and Killer 1103 would max out at 20~25 MB/s on 5ghz using TeraCopy transferring a 3GB Windows ISO file across my home network.The 2.4ghz band would come no wheres close to that speed with the same file transfer.It was about 8~10 MB/s.

Different file types will have different results.

With the current AC-7260 the 3GB ISO transfer is a max of 45 MB/s on 5ghz while an 8.4GB Lone Ranger MKV file has a meager 11 MB/s

The 2.4ghz band has 13 overlapping channels while the 5ghz band is all by itself.

 

I run both n66u and ac66u in my home. I usually run them on latest rmerlin when I have time to update it.(2-3month)
Throughput I can't really tell ~. Feeling wise, on the ac66u, don't think firmware ever changed performance. For the n66u, I think one of the real early firmware is that slightly better on 2.4ghz range.
Antenna design does make some difference, I can try grab some -dbm score on a few card on different machines.

 

5 ghz is more affected by walls then 2.4 ghz from what I've read. I purchased a Motorola modem/router 802.11 AC with a Intel Wireless AC cards and the 2.4 ghz is much faster then the 5ghz network.
.

 

When you say "much faster" which activities are you performing and how far is the notebook from the router.

I have a Motorola router/modem from AT&T that I have turned off wireless in it's settings and have a Netgear R7000 attached to it.

I'm 25 ~30 feet from the router that's located in a walk in closet.There's 2 sheet rock wall between the router and my notebook with a mini pcie Intel AC-7260.I'm using the 17.14 WiFi driver.

The 5ghz band on channel 161 with a link speed of 866.7 Mbps at link score of 100 @ -40 dBm is far superior for me over the 2.4ghz band on channel 7 with a link speed of 300 Mbps at link score 42 @-30 dBm that has frequent dBm drops of 15~20 dBm in all my wireless activities including downloading from the Internet,streaming video and file transfers across my home network.

Another notebook with a Killer N1525 wireless card also has far superior performance on 5ghz and blows the Intel card away in home network file transfers.

I live in a one level 1,500 sq ft ground floor apt with crappy AT&T Internet service.

 

The router is at one end of the house and the laptop is at the other of the house and there are many walls the signal has to go through. Mines about 1,500 feet also but i have Lightning Roadrunner. I based the speed on when I connect to the network and go into the Network and sharing centers and get the connecting speed. I didn't do a real test I just went by what connection speed it showed.

 

I've updated the router's firmware, reconfigured everything from scratch.
Staying close to the router I have 14MB/s with TeraCopy.
In my work position (45dBm) I have 9MB/s. Less than that (about 7MB/s) without TeraCopy.
It seems to be working now, although the speed degrades very much for one reason or another.

Also, don't test the throughput with inSSIDer working: the throughput is severely reduced.

 

Here I am again, after about an year.
The Intel 6300 in my Lenovo has been working very good. In the meanwhile I've switched to Linux and the performance is very consistent.

Now, I'd like to take advantage of the 5GHz network with an old Sony Vaio VGN-FE21 (dating back to 2006). Any chance the integrated antennas support the 5GHz frequency?

 

@noric Antennas should work fine for 5GHz as well.

 

Thanks.
Just ordered an Intel 6200 and an adapter from half size mPCIe to full size mPCIe.
I'll let you know how it goes.

 

I've just noticed that some sources claim the Intel 6200 to be draft-N compatible. Is that true? I can't find an official (Intel) source about it. Could this be a problem?

 

No it can't be a problem. 802.11n standard wasn't finalized for a surprisingly long time and everything had to be draft-n compatible because there was no final standard. It took 7 years from the moment they started to the finalized version being released and more than two years till draft n 2.0 was released to 802.11n being finalized.

Intel 6200 has been later certified to be 802.11n compatible as well (I mean the finalized standard)