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Benchmark: Multi client with high bandwidth and Dual Band

Someone is downloading a large file on his laptop. What happens to the bandwidth available to your device?

To simulate that scenario we will load the Wi-Fi network with a 125 Mbps uplink client trying to download data as fast as possible. This means it will try to pull 90 Mbps. It is placed at a range of about 5 meters from the Wi-Fi Router. Obviously 90 Mbps is a lot, Netflix uses only 16 Mbps, but keep in mind that this speed will not be sustained during testing. It is a great way to detect differences in multi-client performance.

Close range test

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Wi-Fi does not like multiple high-bandwidth streams. The Dir-842 is no exception,  performance drops by 70% when we add the second device on 5 Ghz. Although the speeds aren’t great they are still superior to a 2.4 Ghz device.

Medium range

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At medium range things become more troublesome. The upload speed gets limited to 19 Mbps, which is a lot less then you would get on 2.4 Ghz. Clearly the Dir-842 is not suitable for multiple high bandwidth streams. An area where the more expensive R7000 seems to excel.

Concrete floor

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We already knew the concrete floor results weren’t great. But when we keep the Dir-842 busy the 5 Ghz performance becomes completely unacceptable. To be fair; the R7000 also does not like this test and it drops to performance well below 2.4 Ghz Wi-Fi.

Dual band Performance

The Duo concrete test went pretty bad for all tested devices. But what about 2.4 Ghz? After all we are reviewing a dual band device. So in theory we could have great 2.4 Ghz performance, even when 5 Ghz is congested.

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The 2.4 Ghz performance is great even though the Dir-842 is busy pumping 90 Mbps on 5 Ghz.

Benchmark Summary

These tests show that the DIR-842 can only deal with a single high bandwidth consuming client on 5 Ghz. However, the dual band test demonstrates that this downside can be overcome by using 2.4 Ghz.

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