Buffalo Air Station AC1300 N900 802.11ac Wireless Router Review

Air Station WZR-D1800H 802.11ac Performance Numbers

Since the true usefulness of this new generation of router is in the AC performance, we set up a couple of experiments to test how good this new standard is. Because most people who purchase this router will have legacy devices that still run with Wireless-N or G, we tested what would happen when we connected a 802.11n device to the 5G Wireless-AC on the Buffalo Air Station. We did the same thing that we did in our previous speed test and looked at two different sized packets at the same distance away from the Buffalo router. Our results turned out to be pretty interesting:

Test Results: It turns out that by connecting to an Wireless-AC router does improve your speeds slightly. Comparing the numbers of our 802.11n connecting to the Buffalo Air Station WZR-D1800H show us an increase in average Read/Write speeds for both sized packets tested. The performance with 1 MB data packets is up slightly but the biggest jump was in our multimedia-sized 100MB packets with a 20% increase in Read speeds. Not bad.

We turned off the built-in Wi-Fi on our laptop and then paired a Netgear R6300 802.11ac Router configured as a bridge to our Buffalo Air Station. We are now ready to see what a true 802.11ac wireless network can do. Again we used LAN Speed Test to check the throughput of our 1MB and 100MB data packets.

Test Results: Moving over to 802.11ac certainly makes a difference! While not exactly Gigabit speeds, we saw a 186% increase in average read speeds and a 232% increase in average write speeds. Another result that we didnt show in the above chart was that these speeds were consistent when we varied the distance. Whether the Buffalo router was close to our bridge or 25-feet away (which is our normal testing distance), the speeds were consistent.