This morning
I was playing morning I was doing some performance testing with my new iPad Pro and made an interesting observation, although in retrospect it should have been obvious. My network configuration is…
- Charter Cable internet
- A Cisco DPC3008 cable modem
- Ethernet from the modem to an Apple Airport Time Capsule router running 802.11ac mode dual band
In conducting network speed tests I found my iPad was consistently showing a network download speed in the range of 27 Mbps and upload 4.31Mbps while my iPhone and Mac mini were consistently showing a download speed in the 66Mbps and uploads of 4.24 =Mbps. All tests were conducted using
Speedtest.net by OOKLA or the OOKLA app and verified using Net Analyzer on the iOS devices. Changing from the 2.4 GHz to the 5GHz band brought the iPad Pro up to the higher
Really speed and vice Versa with the iPhone. (we need a lightbulb emoji to go here).
CONCLUSIONS Given a Mac computer built after 2006, and iPhone 5 a 4th generation iPod or later, or any iPad (those that have 802.11n capability) and a dual band router such as the 2007 1st generation Airport Extreme or Airport Express 802.11n or later and a fast enough internet connection to keep up…
- using a 5GHz band channel can realistically double your network and internet speed compared to the same connection using a 2.4GHz band channel.
- Interestingly I was unable to detect any significant speed improvement between 802.11ac and 802.11n but that could be because my incoming network speed is the limiting factor at this point.
WHY? The why is simple and I should have realized this earlier but it was todays tests that brought the issue into sharp focus. The 5GHz band channels have 4 times the bandwidth of the 2.4GHz band channels, 80MHz compared to 20MHz. This also leads me to the conclusion that at this point my internet speed is limited by my ISP and not my WiFi network.
