Wireless Use Cases Are Changing
The router firms are also seeing some changes in how we are using wireless networking inside our homes, and see AC as a really nice way to meet those new challenges. Here are a few of the changes in how customers are using wireless networking in the home, derived from an interview that I recently conducted with NETGEAR and another with Linksys.
More Wireless Devices in the Home
According to some research that NETGEAR was good enough to share with me, the average home in the US that uses Wi-Fi now has an average of 6 wireless devices to serve. This is an increase that is largely being driven by devices other than PC’s. In my own home, I counted 17 wireless devices in place today, of which 3 are PC’s. It is clear that we are relying on wireless networking more than ever, and our home bandwidth is getting crowded!
More Mobility Across the Home
In the old days, I had wireless installed to allow me to move between the home office and other parts of the home with a laptop. I used to run about three laptops on wireless at any one time, and I did not move them around much once I connected. Now, we carry tablets and cell phones across our houses, sometimes while streaming videos or music, and expect the wireless service to keep up. This movement around the home can create issues retaining connections, and handling these issues is a key benefit that comes with the beamforming features in AC. Stay tuned for a future article that does a deeper dive into beamforming.
Requirements for Streaming Are Increasing
Consider some of these developments, as provided by Linksys marketing:
- Worldwide shipments of Smart TVs were forecast to grow 15 percent worldwide in 2012, and expected to reach 95 million by 2016, according to NPD DisplaySearch.
- Forty-seven percent of respondents in a recent YuMe survey said that they have connected a TV to the Internet using an Internet-connected device (video game console, Blu-Ray player, Internet-enabled set-top) for the purpose of viewing online content.
- A recent Nielsen report found that 3.3M people have switched to exclusively streaming video and TV content from digital media receivers and streaming players.
Back in the old days, I was surfing the internet and sending and receiving email from a PC. Now, I stream 1080i Media Center programs to my XBOX360, perform wireless backups of PC’s to my home server, think nothing of copying 2GB and larger files across the network wirelessly, and even stream music and video wirelessly to my tablet and phone. We are doing more wirelessly in the home, even as we increase the number and variety of devices that we use wirelessly. Wireless routing needs to keep up.
How Good is Good Enough?
Netflix actually rates the performance of the various ISP’s that connect to it on a period basis. In April 2013, the best-performing ISP in the US supported speeds of 3.41 Mbps (Google Fiber) and the lowest was Clearwire at 1.24 Mbps. Mine, Comcast, ranked #8 with a throughput measured of 2.11 Mbps. Netflix is actually measuring the speed to the device here, and this can serve as a good baseline for what speeds need to be to deliver the best performance. Note this caveat from Netflix about these results:
These ratings reflect the average performance of all Netflix streams on each ISPs network. The average is well below the peak performance due to many factors including the variety of encodes we use to deliver the TV shows and movies we carry as well as home Wi-Fi and the variety of devices our members use. Those factors cancel out when comparing across ISPs, so these relative rankings are a good indicator of the consistent performance typically experienced across all users on an ISP network.
Note that the results that I derive here will differ with the measurements that Netflix does; headroom above these numbers will generally provide a more stable and stutter-free streaming performance. In addition, the speeds that I measure will be lower than in-network speeds, and will be influenced by non-router issues such as ISP and neighborhood traffic.
Testing Performed
Overview
I read all of this material and wanted to know how much of a real-world benefit would someone see after implementing a wireless AC network. Linksys was nice enough to provide a EA6500 AC1750 router and a WUMC710 AC1300 wireless bridge for me to be able to test some of these value assertions. I installed the WUMC710 bridge (Wi-Fi protected setup, the process was simple and will be documented in a future article) and then connected a PS3 to the bridge. The bridge was connected to the EA6500 on the 5Ghz AC band, and the PS3 was wired via ethernet to the bridge. I then conducted tests of the PS3 download speeds using the network test feature, which pings a website maintained by the PlayStation Network and returns both upload and download speeds experienced, expressed in Mbps. I repeated the tests using 2.4Ghz wireless band and also directly connected the PS3 to a gigabit switch and then to the EA6500. My goal here is to see if Ii could calculate a proxy for the improvement relative to the wired and wireless speeds possible when streaming over the internet with a PS3, one of the more popular devices for Netflix and Hulu streaming. Let’s see what happened.
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