Netgear firmware have better wifi signal/throughput than DD-WRT??

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Wildgoose
Wildgoose's picture
Netgear firmware have better wifi signal/throughput than DD-WRT??

I’ve been running Kong’s DD-WRT firmware on my 3500L and has been very happy with its performance, except wireless. While the router has been rock solid, reboot not necessary even after a few month of heavy use, the wireless signal in certain part of my house has been weak and slow.

I recently got another 3500L and wanted to use it to provide better wireless signal in the trouble part of the house. But first I thought I’d compare the wireless performance of the netgear firmware vs dd-wrt to make sure I am getting the same signal level/throughput. I was pretty shocked by the difference.

With the netgear firmware, I have very decent wireless signal throughout the house! I can watch Netflix on the ipad in locations where I couldn’t with the dd-wrt signal. Swapping the two routers back and forth, my results are confirmed. In speedtest on a laptop, netgear gave me 10mbps+, while dd-wrt gave me 1-5 barely.

In DD-WRT, the TX power is set to Kong’s default 40. Bumping this to 70 does not provide a visible throughput boost, it more or less remains the same!

So my question is, has anyone else noticed a weaker wifi signal with dd-wrt vs the netgear firmware? What is the equivalent TX setting the netgear firmware is using? If any netgear engineers are monitoring this forum, can you publish some guidance on what setting we should use in DD-WRT so the wifi signal is comparable to what the netgear firmware is doing?

Also, does anyone know if Tomato uses the same wireless setting as DD-WRT by default? In my brief test of Tomato a while back, I recall seeing some decent wifi performance (I picked DD-WRT in the end because it feels more polished).

Diver
Diver's picture
I'm running the DD-WDR

I'm running the DD-WDR recommended 14929 BIG build on my 3500L, internet Connection is 150'000 / 10'000 kBit/s. This Speed is however only possible using a wired Gigabit connection. With wireless N I get consistent speed of slightly above 100'000 kBit/s, i.e. about 12'500 kByte/s, which is about 12.2 mByte/s.

As far as I know this is more or less what you can expect from an N connection, but please be carefull when you test. Use same encryption (WPA2/AES in my case), same channels, don't run the test with multiple Access Points on as they will interfere and probably not allow one AP to use the ideal channel setup.

If you can, you'll probably want to use a cable for large transfers. I measured max throughput of my wired setup as well (one router, a total of 4 switches) and the trhoughput is about 10 times faster than wireless. That's why I'd never use WiFi for something like creating a backup :-)

Li Tai Fang
Li Tai Fang's picture
I used to have a Linksys

I used to have a Linksys Astray (E1000v2 to be exact) as my Repeater Bridge. It had SNR between 25 to 35, depending on time of the day. I switched to WNR3500L because I needed Gigabit ethernet to connect my computers.
However, the wireless performance is abysmal on a couple of DD-WRT Kong build I've tried (i.e., 19545 and 17865 without newd), fluctuating around 10-15 SNR right now.

Does anyone know of a DD-WRT build that gives decent wireless signals?

Thanks.