A few days ago I installed a smart meter and found out that even with all the hardware turned off I still have about 30W of power consumption. I tracked that down to network equipment. I am using 4 DLAN adapter. They consume 4W each. They have a power saving mode but that makes almost no difference. Another 15-20W for an old speedport WLAN router. Sure that thing is kind of crap but I didn’t expect such an high power consumption. Time for an upgrade.
I am running a netgate 3100 as router / firewall. I don’t want to replace that since it is doing a good job to keep me protected and my storagenodes up an running. I would say for now I am willing to pay the electricity for it. I could maybe replace my internet modem. The netgate router has an opt port so maybe I can slot in a VDSL port and cut out the modem. But on the other hand I am still waiting for fiber to get installed… So lets not worry about it for now.
I need a new WLAN AP / WLAN router in AP mode. No additional services needed since the netgate router still covers all of it. Just WLAN.
What is the lowest power consumption I can get? As a reference I found Asus RT-AX58U with 8W under load and 5W idle. Any newer models that might get even lower?
Does it make sense to downgrade the network to 2.4GHz and switch on 5GHz only if a client needs high throughput? I do have a smart meter that will get polled by homeassistant every 10 seconds. But it doesn’t need any bandwidth. Some kind of low power mode would be great most of the day.
In order to replace the DLAN adapter I would also need 3 WLAN USB sticks or pcie cards. Low latency for video calls and stuff would be great. Troughput doesn’t matter that much. Any ideas?
If I could save 20w 24x7, for a year, it would reduce my power bill by around $25/year. It has never been worth paying to replace computer stuff before it’s broken or obsolete: but your electric rates may be much higher.
This is no longer true. 802.11ax latency is sub-1ms. Dfs channels are still quite empty in most places. 6GHz band is empty as well, and latency is even lower.
Of course, stationary equipment shall not be polluting spectrum, if it is immovable — it shall be connected with physical cable.
But to give the OP the benefit of the doubt: maybe they have reasons to keep using wifi. Surely, universally very bad reasons, but reasons nevertheless.
On topic: pick one of Ubiquiti access points. Don’t buy trash to save couple of watts. There are many ways to screw up the WiFi.
A friend told me yesterday U6 or U7 lite should work for me. They also have a relative low power consumption. Looks good to me.
That means I only need 3 USB sticks or PCIe extension cards. Situation here would be one wall that has some steal in it but otherwise everything is short distance.
My next step will be to measure my current WLAN signal in different locations. It might be that the 2.4GHz band is the one I have to focus on. I don’t really know how bad these walls are.
You can use WiFiMan app to do this, walk around with it, it will build a map of your place with heatmap of the signal strength.
Don’t run anything, let alone nodes, on 2.4 GHz network (WiFi 2, 3, and 4). ISM specturm is noisiest and overcrowded. You really don’t want to operate on the frequencies that are also shared with your neigbours 2kW microwave oven. It’s fine for IoT, but that’s it.
And yes, the latency would be exact problem Vadim alluded above. Forget 2.4Ghz exists. In fact, turn it off altogether. Create separte 2.4Ghz-only network for iOT if you have any.
And pull the cable. With reinforced concrete construction you really need an access point in every room: each room is literaly faraday cage. You can look at Ubiquiti’s in-wall AP models – they are pretty inconspicuous and work well.
Thanks a lot. In front of the AP I have -30db and behind 1-2 walls it gets down to -60db. The new AP would get a better spot. I would estimate like 15db penality. The point is it still used 5GHz over 2.4GHz. Only if I go to 3 or more walls it switches to the 2.4 GHz band.
UBNT U6 Pro often outperforms U7 Pro when comparing 5G WiFi. I’ve tested both in my home with many reinforced concrete walls, and steadily gets 200-300mbps MORE effective bandwidth with its superior MIMO capabilities.
however, if you are keen on 6G you should consider U7.
U7: 2 x 2 (DL/UL MU-MIMO)
U6: 4 x 4 (DL/UL MU-MIMO)
U7 makes sense only if you are going to use 6G, and in this case, you need way more of them than one – because of worse propagation of 6GHz signals you need higher density of access points. This somewhat counteracted by lower noise floor for now – but this will change once adoption picks up.
Either way it’s definitely overkill for home – where anything high performance shall be wired.
I’m actually planning to sell U7 and buy another in-wall U6.
This sounds like the worst of both worlds: high power consumption, new chipset, only two streams.
If power consumption is a priority — you can get u6+ — also two streams like 7 — but at almost half the power.
If wireless performance is a priority - u6 Pro at same power consumption gets you 4 streams.
Or you can get U6 Mesh that IIRC has injector included.
U7 Lite appears the worst proposition — high power consumption, low performance, and unpolished chipset… don’t buy lite.
I’m using this for outdoor coverage, it’s performance is very close to U6 PRO, and with slightly lower power consumption (~1,5w less than U6 PRO) But with FAR better range - I get close to 300mbit on my iphone 100+ meters out from the backyard
4x4 MIMO (on U6 PRO/MESH) throughput and latency wins in real world scenarios, (I know most clients only do 2x2 MIMO) as concurrent traffic is the usual performance killer (next to reinforced concrete and radio-noisy neighbours )
In terms of pricing, the additional cost going from U7 Lite → U6 PRO is absolutely worth it (both in coverage and performance).
On the first glance it is the same coverage as before. With enough walls it still falls back to 2.4GHz. That was expected. What has improved is latency especially in these situations. All 3 PCs have a ping of less than 10 ms. That improvement is awesome. Throughput isn’t a requirement for me. I can say it is faster compared to the old DLAN adapter but I didn’t measure how much. I don’t expect the U7 lite to be the fastest model. My goal was to have low latency and low power consumption. That has worked out. Thank you all.
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