Buffalo Air Station AC1300 N900 802.11ac Wireless Router Review

By

Air Station WZR-D1800H Performance Numbers

Buffalo WZR-D1800H AC Router
We wanted to test our router in a real world environment so we connected the Buffalo Air Station WZR-D1800H to a PC running Windows 7 64-bit and configured it using Automatic settings for both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands. We then took a laptop with an Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6230 wireless adapter and moved it 25-feet away from where we set up the router. As always, we didn’t tell the client anything more than the SSID for the router and let it automatically choose the best channel for it to connect to. The router’s security was set to Unsecure/Open Mode (for fastest data throughput), and with WMM / QoS turned ON. After connecting, we ran the PC application LAN Speed Test (LST) v 2.0.8 to measure file transfer and network speeds. LST builds a file in memory and then transfers the packet without the effects of windows file caching. It then reports the time and calculates the network speed.

LAN Speed Test v.2.0.8

We repeated the test 2 more times rotating the router 90 degrees after each test to make sure that the router’s speed was affected adversely by its orientation.

Router Speed Test Wireless-N

Test Results: Our first test of 1MB data was run was with our Wireless-N client connected to the 5Ghz Wireless-N channel on the Buffalo D1800H. To my surprise, the Wireless-N performance didnt exactly blow away the competition with both the Read and Write speeds hovering in the area of the Western Digital My Net N900 router.

Image Description
Test Results: We ran our speed tests with 100MB data packet sizes to simulate the kind of data that one would see when streaming multimedia like high-definition video. Again, the Buffalo WZR-D1800H performs almost identically to that of the Western Digital My Net N900. While not spectacular numbers, the performance is solid.

Lets take a look at how the new Wireless-AC works.

Comments are closed.