replacing rt-n66u with rt-ac86u -- also, intel ac-9260 adapter

*EDIT: TL/DR? This thread was me trying to figure out which router and wifi card to select. I went through many thought processes and considered many different routers. But with the help of this forum community, all of my questions were answered. SO the title is a little misleading. I ultimately purchased Netgear R7800 and Intel 9260ac Wireless adapters and very happy!

Hello,

I've two planned purchases coming up soon. I want to bounce my ideas off you guys to see if I'm making a sound choice or if there are other/better considerations.

Router -

Old router is Asus rt-n66u I purchased in 2012.

New router would be Asus rt-ac86u​

Location -

This is for a 4 bedroom single story house with my office den set conveniently near it's center. That is where the router will live. I don't plan to use multiple access points or range extenders. The older N66u was pretty good with sending wifi to all the rooms.​

Usage -

Most of the wifi consumption is from our four prime firesticks connected to TVs and sometimes that includes 4k content. I think quad streaming of the n86u will help if multiple people are consuming wifi at same time from different devices. Is that marketing hype or can it really help?
​

Other routers I've been considering -

Netgear X10, TP-Link Talon AD7200, or Asus gt-ac5300.

I liked the netgear and asus for the extra lan ports (aggregation ports too).

x10 and talon offer 802.11AD and that is nice, but I don't have any devices that could benefit from it. It is also line of site within a single room. So, for me, the x10 and talon would only act as dual band routers, same as the N86u (and n86u is much less $ than these others). The x10 has bundled plex server but I already have plex server running on core i7 linux box and I expect the 3770k can transcode 4k much better than the cpu in a router.

The 3rd band in the asus gt-ac5300 is an extra 5Ghz that acts as an automatic overflow if main 5GHz becomes too congested. I can see that being a benefit, but the GT-ac5 300 had many many 1 star ratings. Is it really as bad as those reviews are saying?

​

Are there any other good wifi routers you recommend? I've looked at the ubiquity EdgeRouter bundled with their AC Pro access points. But I like a single central wifi broadcast solution. I didn't want to pull wires through the wall to reach the APs, so I crossed ubiquity off my list for now.​

laptop wifi card -

I'm also considering upgrading the Intel wifi card in my dell 7710 laptop from AC-8260 to AC-9260. I see there is also an 9560, but I don't understand it's interface type so I think I'm safer sticking to 9260



Does the intel ac-9260 and n86u sound like a good move?

Thanks

 

The AC86U has decent 5Ghz performance, excellent VPN performance and a good UI with regular updates. Only major caveat is you need to disable MU-MIMO as it is a Broadcom chipset based router meaning it can cause a performance decrease due to Broadcom's terrible implementation. Another thing is it lacks 160Mhz support to double bandwidth on the 9260AC cards but that's a minor point.

Best Wi-Fi routers especially in terms of 5Ghz range and performance would be the Qualcomm QCA9984 WiFi chipset based routers like the Netgear R7800, Synology RT2600AC and Asus BRT AC828. All three use the Qualcomm IPQ8065 CPU and QCA9984 WiFi chipset combo. The first two support 160Mhz and Qualcomn routers have working MU-MIMO. To utilize MU-MIMO you need two or more MU capable devices IE your 8265AC and 9260AC.

The Netgear R7800 is still on most reviews the best performing 5Ghz unit plus working MU-MIMO and HT160, main downside being a dated UI, less frequent updates (IE every 2 months) and minor non critical bugs.

The 9560AC and 9260AC both use M.2 and are functionally the same. Main difference is that part of the Wi-Fi chipset functionality on the 9560AC is on the 8th Gen Intel CPU meaning it's a two part solution that won't work with older gen CPUs even though it will fit in the M.2 slot. Performance wise both will be the same.


TLDR: Yeah that's a decent combo but disable MU-MIMO on the router.

 

Thank you very informative.
Does it not then make any sense for me to upgrade from ac8260 to ac9260 if didn't also get a router that offers 160hz ability? Can you explain the160hz, what it means, benefits of it, and also why it is considered a minor thing? How can i identify which routers suport 160hz, do they list that in specs? I just see adapters list that in specs but I don't really understand it.

Thanks

 

I took a liberty of wringing a little thing on 160MHz it's a sticky on top of this forum - see here if you are interested.
There is no comprehensive list of routers that support 160MHz channels - the best way to look for them is to use WikiDevi and look for VHT160

 

Meh, keep the 8260 not really worth the upgrade. Only difference between the 8265 and 8260 is MU-MIMO support. Then now with the 9260 , it has a nice minor 40-50 Mbps Max speed bump at HT80, plus HT160 support. HT160 is nice and all and will give you peek speeds of around 920 Mbps which is near the Ethernet limit but unless you have a NAS that you transfer to a lot or Gig internet don't worry too much about it. Also HT160 has lower range so the router will switch to HT80 mode when signal is low anyway.

 

After reading the 160MHz sticky, that feature may be more trouble than it's worth. Not just a "meh" feature, but with potential 1hr without an 5GHz SSID if the router steps into a DFS radar channel?... makes the 160Mhz feature something I may want to avoid entirely.

That said, I do have a few linux servers in my homelab which i transfer large files to and from. VHT160 sounds like nice to have if it can be setup reliably (80+80 non contiguous router and if ac9260 support 80+80).

The ASUS BRT-AC828 peaks my interest. In addition to some cool features WikiDevi shows it also having "Wave2 (160MHz)".
https://wikidevi.com/wiki/ASUS_BRT-AC828/M2

A few internet searches on "Wave2 160Mhz" shows wave2 supporting 80+80:

also this page from Qualcomm QCA9984 shows 80+80 support
https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qca9984


Armed with new information I'll do more research and come to decision hopefully soon.

Thank you very much, both of you.

 

On my R7800 HT160 isn't an issue with DFS because the QCA9984 would drop to 80Mhz if a DFS priority user was detected and stay in the non DFS section without any dropout. It drops to 80Mhz when signal is too low as well so it's good about that. I personally am not near any radars so my unit stays at HT160 when serving my 9260ac.

What you read were issues with the Marvell chipset in the Linksys WRT3200 which seems to want go stick to 160Mhz even when not possible. The Marvell chip also seems to falsely detect radar which aggrevates the issue. As I said earlier the QCA9984 is the most mature in terms of advertised features actually working and is IMHO the best performing Wi-Fi chipset (seen in the Netgear R7800, Synology RT2600AC and a few others)

Also with the 9260AC you need to use the lower channels for HT160 as it only supports contiguous HT160 and not 80+80 split bonding, if you use upper channels it will just stay at HT80.

 

Thanks. Is there another adapter besides 9260ac that might work with lower and upper channels?

 

No, Intel 9260/Killer 1550 (it's the same thing) is the only Wi-Fi card available for computers that supports 160 MHz channels.
There are other radio chips and even other cards that do so but these cards are mini-PCI Express and are meant to be used in routers not in computers.

 

I believe I'm narrowing it down to... netgear orbi. I wasn't looking for anything other than standalone router/wifi package, but the orbi looks like great range with satellites.

smallnetbuilder gave it a good review. I'm going to give it a shot.

Also it has the qualcom QCA9984. I'm trying to decide which package to get as they offer many different package setups to choose from. I think the RBK50.

Regardless what I get for router I plan to get the 9260ac

 

The Orbi only uses the QCA9984 for backhaul as in between router and satellite unit. Client side it uses a dual antenna system with the IPQ4019 chipset so Max link rate is 866 Mbps with real world speeds around 500-560 Mbps depending on distance and interference from near by APs. Orbit is great if you need to cover a large area that normally has dead spots. If you get good speeds across your home on a single router like I do then a single router is a better choice. My home is mostly wood/drywall interior so my single router (R7800) outperforms the Orbi at all ranges. However if you have more granite flooring and concrete walls range especially on 5Ghz drops considerably as it can't penetrate as well as 2.4 Ghz. In such cases or if you have a huge area to cover Orbi is better.

 

hmm I see. Glad I didn't pull the trigger yet. More research tomorrow. Thanks for the info!

 

@Aivxtla The netgear nighthawk x4s you originally suggested is sounding pretty good. I see you also have netgear R8500 x8. Would you recommend one over the other? Thanks

 

The R8500 uses an older ARM Cortex A9 CPU clocked at 1.4Ghz and the one in the R7800 is like +65% (Krait 300 Cores @ 1.7 Ghz equivalent to ARM Cortex A15) faster especially for things like VPN not to mention runs cooler. The R7800 even without hardware NAT acceleration can hit 700+ Mbps while the R8500 would do around 450 Mbps. Things like traffic monitoring, VPN, QoS break hardware NAT so it's then done in software while R7800 can maintain hardware NAT with QoS.

Also the Wi-Fi chipset in the R7800 is better and has MU MIMO that actually works vs Broadcom's terrible implementation. But it's foes have pretty decent if not great Wi-Fi performance. The R8500 internally is pretty similar to the Asus AC88U and is based on the older gen R7000/AC68U hardware with an upgrade to 4x4 antennas with MU MIMO, where the latter had 3x3.

Having said that the R8500 is decent and link aggregation (dual Ethernet to a single client like my NAS) is nice along with the extra 5 Ghz band but my R7800 already handles 20+ devices well enough on its two bands (2.4/5 Ghz), range/performance is also pretty good. Recently the R7800S QoS feature got hosed but the R8500'S works fine.

I recently also received an Orbi from Netgear for a test so those comparisons are from my experience. But at the moment only the R7800 is in use.

Another thing is don't waste money on the XR500 it's literally an R7800 with double the flash (256 MB) but same 512MB RAM and has Duma QoS additions so its pretty much confirmed because they made us test the firmware on an extra R7800 that Netgear sent us as the casing for the XR500 wasn't available at test time.

 

VPN server
VLAN
Link Aggregation
and still offer fast and reliable network traffic.
Or am I asking too much from consumer router companies. ha


@Aivxtla You run stock firmware on r7800, is that correct?

I'd probably only have two or three laptops using MIMO after I upgrade those laptops with AC9260 adapters. MU-MIMO aside, is there any compelling reason to look at broadcom routers or should I try to stick to qualcom QCA9984? MU-MIMO, 160Hz 80+80 etc are cool, I want them, but in comparison to other features, they are maybe not as important.

I'm pretty close on going with R7800. I do need a good VPN server, so it is nice to hear that it performs well on r7800. I often VPN into the old n66u router so that I or my customers can access demo applications on some of my servers. I should try to keep those servers on their own VLAN though. VLAN is one reason I may consider something like the x10. Link aggregation feature on x8(r8500) and x10(r9000) are nice. I wonder if ddwrt or another open firmware can apply aggregation bonding of lan ports on the r7800.

Maybe I'll buy two routers, r7800 and x10 since I cannot decide. lol

 

The AC86U uses a low power Cortex A53 which technically is slower per every Mhz than the Krait core in the R7800 IE 2.3 Dmips/Mhz vs 3.39 Dmips/Mhz but it has hardware crypto acceleration allowing the AC86U to hit 100+ Mbps on Open VPN while the R7800 does around 70-80 Mbps or so. The R8500/AC88U would do like 40-50 Mbps due to both a slower CPU and no crypto acceleration.

The R9000 uses the same QCA9984 Wi-Fi chip as the R7800 but has a Amazon subsidiary built CPU by Annapurna labs which is a stock Quad Core Cortex A15 and I believe it has cryptography acceleration. Do note OpenVPN is single threaded. The R9000 doesn't support HT160 I'm guessing due to integration issues with the Amazon chip (yes that Amazon that you know). Other than that it is somewhat close to the R7800 in 5Ghz Wi-Fi performance though the R7800 is still king in that aspect.


Honestly you could go for any of them depending on what features are more important for your use case, though I do feel the R9000 is overpriced. I gave my R9000 away to my uncle as my R7800 had better 5Ghz performance and I didn't need the extra CPU power and associated NAS feature as I already have a dedicated NAS (also from another Netgear test lol)

Simplified:
Wi-Fi Performance and working luxury features IE HT160 & MU MIMO: R7800

VPN Performance with decent Wi-Fi performance: AC86U

Link Aggregation and decent Wi-Fi performance: AC88U/R8500.


Also I find LEDE aka OpenWRT better than DD-WRT at least on Qualcomm units because I see better performance and stability and importantly you also have SQM QoS that is amazing at balancing bandwidth between devices. hnyman on LEDE forums compiles/releases OpenWRT/LEDE builds every few days. Note that even stock Netgear firmware for the R7800 is OpenWRT based albeit a dated version. And yes I use stock firmware. Also Voxel on SNB forums provides modified stock with performance tweaks and updated packages from OpenWRT for better security, bug fixes and performance.

 

excellent. thank you for your time in answering my questions and providing such good info.

We have three firesticks and one firestick-4k. They say MIMO supported a/b/g/n/ac, so I'm thinking that is same as the MU-MIMO. I think I'm going with the r7800

 

I bought a factory refurbished Netgear R7800 from Amazon and it has worked without issues paired with Killer 1550 or Intel 9260.

I'm using 5ghz channel 48 and inSSIDer shows my theoretical data rate mostly at the Max 1,733.30.My notebook is close to 4 years old and originally had an Intel M.2 NGFF Intel 7260ac.

The notebook is about 15' and line of sight with the R7800.

In Q3 Asus will begin shipping 3 x 802.11ax routers so I wouldn't spend too much on something now.

I highly recommend getting on the Amazon waiting list for a refurb R7800.I think I waited about 2/3 weeks to get mine.

The Killer 1550 wireless card is also on Amazon with Killer (Rivet Networks) as the seller and FREE 1 day shipping to Prime Members.

Transfering files from router attached storage to the notebook was as high as 102 MB/s

 

FYI if you really want to spend $300+ on a high end unit though I discourage it, the tri band Asus ROG GT5300AC (Not the RT5300AC which is an R8500 equivalent) is better than the R9000 and Wi-Fi performance on this Broadcom based unit is close to the R7800 if not the same and it has link aggregation plus the VPN performance of the 86U as this is basically an 86U with two more CPU cores and an extra 5Ghat band.


Also don't buy the new AX routers on release for the following reasons:
1. When you buy new expensive routers you are the guinea pig and trouble shooter as the firmware is not matured so you are basically paying to beta test.

2. AX standard won't be finalized till late 2019 so any missing features may or may not make it into early AX draft units. Plus 0 real clients till next year anyway.

Best to get AC routers at lower prices when draft AX routers release.

With routers old is usually gold.

 

Good info, thanks again. I got a good price on an r7800

 

*Edit: whew! resolved with a reset to factory. Next I'll slowly apply my advanced settings being sure i don't hose it up again.

Edit #2: It's working. ht160 enabled and 9260ac connected to it. I think the problem I had was that I tried to do initial setup with a very old firmware from 2015. It wasn't until I did factory reset after updating the firmware, then allowing it to default config that it began to see my modem signal. After that I was able to customize it to my liking. So far I don't have any complaints about the UI. It's pretty easy to navigate. We'll see if DDNS client can connect to DYN and test out the VPN server this week. The only painful part was having to factory reset after I had entered in 30 port forwardings, but that's my fault for trying to use old firmware. loll



/*this is resolved - i'll keep my original post here though:*/

Perhaps you folks have some idea to help my router to see my modem internet connection. I'm setting up the r7800. I apologise in advance for typos as I'm typing this from my phone at moment
It came with firmware 1.0.2.28
I'm having trouble getting it to see internet connection from modem. led shows orange. I'm not dsl, I'm using Cox ISP so i don't pppeo login to my ISP.
sequence of events
Powered it on first time. I plugged in via Ethernet to one of the four LAN ports and other end to my laptop. I did not connect to modem at that time, i wanted to configure everything first. I typed 192.168.1.1 into browser, set new password etc. I opted not to let it configure automatically. Perhaps that was my mistake
Set it up with WiFi ssids. Enabled ht160, added port forwardings and static dhcp IP clients.
Saved all my settings, powered off then i moved it to the modem, connected modem to router wan, powered on and i get orange led on router for internet (not seeing the connection).
I downloaded 1.0.2.52 firmware, but that was rejected as invalid. I had to make smaller jump... First from 1.0.2.28 to 44 then finally to 1.0.2.52. but still not getting connection from modem.
I've rebooted modem and router at least 6 times now. Tried different cables.
I may do a reset to factory settings and see if it works better. Or Maybe i need to call Cox to send reset signal to the modem, i don't know at this point.
Any ideas? Thanks​

 

Interestingly ms windows 10 didn't update to latest driver version for bt5 an WLAN devices when i clicked to update in device manager for 9260ac. I downloaded them myself from Intel website. I guess that's normal, ms windows cloud repository of driver files just isn't always up to date. I chose to update just the drivers and not download the Intel proset software.

 

r7800 first impressions. The WiFi strength even on 5GHz is excellent and in the short time I've been using it I'm very satisfied with the network speeds.

The UI is easy very easy to navigate to find what I needed. Overall I'm loving the wifi range and speeds and very pleased with my purchase

Just a few gripes, some of which I hope to resolve eventually.


I wish it would list the device names in the attached device listing. Instead it shows a bunch of IPs with a generic icons. Maybe I'm doing something wrong there. What's more, I've named some of these IP and MAC#s already in DHCP Reservation list, I think it should at least pull those names over into the attached device listing. Asus I think had a good solution where it would grab the hostname or computer name from the device and display it in their device list.

DDNS update tool-
Setup was easy on the nr7800 using my DYN account I've had since 2012. Curious though, what if I were not on DYN? Netgear only provides a few DDNS companies to choose from in the drop down. I could've installed a cURL script onto a 24/7 server to update my DNS provider with the new IP whenever it changed (I did do that before routers offered the convenience of this feature). Not a big deal if you are on DYN and luckily I am.

VPN-
I've not setup any VPN service previously other than the one that conveniently was preinstalled on my old asus router (using PPTP). PPTP may not be super secure, but it sure is easy to use via windows VPN client. I'm having a hard time trying to get openVPN's client on my laptop to connect and give full network and internet access. Laptop client is on a remote/seperate network from the R7800 LAN that I'm VPN tunneling into during my test shown below:


I've followed the instructions: Ive installed the openVPN client onto my laptop. I've downloaded the certificates and ovpn config file from the router to laptop and copied to openVPN config folder. I've renamed the TAP adapter to NEGEAR-VPN on the laptop, which is necessary because it is referenced as such in the the opvn config file.

Connecting to the VPN server from my remote laptop client at first the openVPN client gives error shown above in red about server certificate verification not enabled, but then a few seconds later it does connect and give green icon in notification tray. But I cannot access the devices on that network. I cannot browse internet on that network. Strange though, I can do a google search. Google returns search results but if I click on them I get a timeout saying to check my connection.

I read somewhere online that openVPN requirements say the remote vpn client (my laptop) must be on different subnet than the VPN server. In other words, if the subnet address range of the LAN I'm tunneling in to is 192.168. 1.0/24 (ie 192.168. 1.0-192.168. 1.255) then my laptop needs to be different subnet such as 192.168. 2.100. I can experiment with that more this week. But if anyone here is an openVPN expert who can help out, I'd appreciate it.


Other than that, no complaints at all, and the LEDs are pretty.

 

For VPN yeah you need to be on a different subnet but I forget which one TUN or TAP one of them allows VPN even on LAN connection.

As for Attached devices yeah that’s a Netgear screwup, hopefully fixed in the next firmware. If you use the Netgear mobile app or Desktop Genie App names are visible in those.

I also read one of your previous posts and I forgot to clarify that MU-MIMO and MIMO aren’t exactly the same.

MIMO simply means multiple in multiple out.
If you have two antenna clients in 2x2 means both antennas can send and receive and is MIMO same applies to 2x3, 3x3, 3x4, 4x4 etc. 1x2 and 2x1 mean two antennas but with single send and two receive or visa versa SIMO/MISO. Single antenna clients are SISO as in single send and receive. Basically most if not almost all 2 or more antenna clients all are MIMO from phones to iPads to laptops. MU is an additional feature.

MU-MIMO means Multi User - MIMO as in you can have 3x 1x1 clients, 2 1x1 and a 2x2 client or 2 2x2 clients (on a 4 antenna router) actively receiving data (down link only / download). The QCA 9984 is the only current chip that can handle 2 2x2 clients. All the others can only use 3 streams as in 3 1x1 clients or 1 1x1 and 1 2x2 client as they operate in an n-1 fashion. N being number of antennas on a router.

With most MU clients being 2x2, MU-MIMO on 3 or less antenna routers is almost useless. Without MU MIMO a router will actively serve one client at a time in a round robin fashion but it happens so fast you don’t notice it, but as number of active devices increases obviously you have lower simultaneous bandwidth and increased latencies which are theoretically reduced by MU-MIMO as you have the router switching through groups of MU devices at a time rather than just single clients.

 

Thanks for the confirmation about openvpn and subnets. And for the knowledge on mimo

I'll also try their Android app on my phone.

 

Hello,

I'm sometimes unable to connect my laptop to the 5Ghz WiFi signal ofthe R7800. 2.4GHz SSID works fine. Windows simply says unable to connect when I select the 5GHz SSID. It's supposed to auto connect, but then jumps to the 2.4Ghz when it fails. If I try to manually select the 5GHz SSID windows10 says unable to connect after a few attempts. This is with the laptop sitting just a few feet away from the router.

I reboot the router and it works again. Our other laptop (same model laptop with same 9260ac) connects to 5GHz SSID fine everytime and so do all of our other devices that use the 5GHz SSID.

I'm going to try setting up a reserved IP for this laptop's wifi MAC address in the LAN settings of the r7800. Maybe that will keep it from being rejected. I won't know until tomorrow or the next day when I try to connect again to see if this is a working solution.

Anyone else see this behavior where the r7800 rejects connections? I don't know if it is on my client side or on the router side causing this but after rebooting the router it works fine again.

*edit: so far so good after reserving ip 192.168.1.100 for my laptops mac address. I'll monitor for a few more days, if after a week it's still fine then I'll presume it is resolved by using reserved ip. Interesting though I don't see this laptop's reserved IP in attached device listing. I think that listing is pretty wanky to begin with though.

If I continue having this issue I may try other firmware's such as from LEDE project, etc.

 

I found my solution to this. It was happening just on my laptop, unable to connect to the 5GHz signal. Other devices were fine and 2.4GHz worked fine with my laptop. Just the 5GHz was a problem.

Failed solutions:
- deleting and reinstalling latest 9260ac intel driver.
- rebooting router only solved for a few days before having to reboot it again.
- setting reserved IP in router DHCP seetings for my laptop.
- latest router firmware

Working solution:
- disable 9260ac power saving


Come to think of it, I usually turn this off on all of my laptops for similar reasons. It's just been awhile since I've had a new laptop or wifi card I forgot to do this when I got my new 9260ac.