In newer Draytek models the perceived performance of wireless as been lacking based on earlier models such as the rock solid 2860n/plus with reduced range and throughput speeds, in particular poor VoIP performance for my industry.

This could be down to the passage of time and how WiFI has become even more ubiquitous, in demand and ultimately a more congested radio band. Regardless an alternative solution needs to be explored.

Previous dabbling with deployment of Unifi access points have yielded trouble fee results, so this would be a quick win. Trouble is, the default AC-Pro and AC-LR are in serious supply shortages at present. Wifi 6 variants have better stock availability but also have a higher purchase cost.

The only Unifi AC product that is plentiful is the NanoHD, so in desperation lets see if it is a justifiable upgrade to the Draytek offering…

Test Environment

There’s nothing scientific about the test setup here, I’m currently using a Draytek 2927ac for WiFi so will switch all home wireless traffic over to the Unifi AC-Nano (by cloning SSID and PSK) and observing any changes.

I’ll keep the Draytek radio’s active during use of the Nano, adding a ‘_D’ to the SSID to differentiate the devices for testing. This will also add a bit of competition on the radio spectrum that is now commonplace.

Location

The competing devices are placed within a foot of each other to give an accurate range comparison, I’ve chosen to suspend mount the Unifi as research suggests the antenna’s in the unit are somewhat directional.

As this is mounted on a fixture on the ground floor, I’d be interested on discovering WiFi performance on the first floor, ultimately to discover how directional the antenna’s are.

As mentioned, both Draytek and Unifi units will be broadcasting SSID’s and within a foot of each other, chosen as a worst case scenario of how each compete / compare in the radio spectrum (auto channel enabled on both).

Test Equipment

For simplicity, its a Samsung Galaxy Note9 using speedtest.net app, connecting to the same test server each time.

Test One

First test is an indoor line of sight, test phone is approx 25 feet away from the access points but still in line of sight.

Unifi:

Draytek:

I wouldn’t expect this to be a struggle, but both results were far shy of the available 550Mbps download bandwidth, however this could be down to the test server as it was kept as a constant. Upload reached full utilisation at 75Mbps.

Draytek wins this round.

Test Two

Relatively speaking I have a home that’s easy for Wifi, small and of traditional brick construction. To create a bit of a challenge for comparison the next will be from outside and within the car sitting on the drive, approx 50 foot distance

Unifi

Draytek

Something I’ve noticed during testing is the Unifi does seem to offer a better range over the Draytek, giving better bars / RSSI on the fringes of my network.

Results are pretty even, but from a VoIP perspective the latency and jitter under load is way too high to support real time media.

Test Three

More of a real world test, I have a Raspberry Pi Zero running in a garden shed running off a solar panel and 12V battery. The Pi Zero WiFi antenna is self contained on the chip, being a challenge to an access point to create a reliable connection to it from a distance.

The AC-Nano was installed on 9th June, although the ping times don’t show much of an improvement.

Summary

The results were disappointingly similar considering adding AC wireless to a Draytek router is around £40, compared to the £130 in buying the NanoHD (before required controller / Clouldkey).

Yes the NanoHD is not the most suitable product for the testing, but as mentioned this is the only one that has plentiful stock at the moment.

From testing, the Nano seems to advertise a better signal to devices than the Draytek, so ‘devices’ such as my car can pick up Wifi on the Nano where the Draytek could not.

But on comparison, this signal increase does not yield better throughput, devices that pick up the Draytek get more or less the same, with the Draytek advertising a greater speed.

From a VoIP perspective, where both pushed over 1 second latency on upload at load, neither can be considered a solution. I understand that a speedtest.net test aims to utilise all available bandwidth, but in real world scenarios, there nothing to stop any other application acquiring all available bandwidth during normal use and negatively affecting voice traffic at the same time.

Finally if you were wondering, suspending the NanoHD then using a device “behind” it (i.e above its location) worked fine.

Update: August 2021

Since initial testing I ended up reverting back to the Draytek for Wifi, as performance was the same and saved on powering another device. However I’ve now sourced an AC-Pro and replaced it in the same location as the NanoHD.

Performance with this model is improved, not so much from increased speed or reduced jitter but whats noticable is the reliability of devices on the fringes of range.

Below is a recent graph from the Pi Zero:

Its clear to see the AP-Pro’ installation on 9th Aug by the lowered ping times.

Its not perfect however as seen with the spikes, however am starting to suspect this is lining up with my activity in having other Wifi devices (laptop, mobile) in the same vicinity or between the Pi and Pro is causing these spikes.

If time permits I’d would like to revisit this compare the AC-Pro and NanoHD side by side, but for the original brief of is a NanoHD better than a Draytek, the answer is No.

I use a Netgear FVS318N for my wireless connections and a frustration is that the region is locked to Europe, where the radio power is limited more than other parts of the world.

This means the highest achievable power is half, raising it to full results in this dead end:

Very annoying, this post shows how to get a region locked Netgear use all the power available, and to discover what devices in the area are competing for the wireless space.

Back to my initial problem of intermittent connections. Thinking the worst, the first hunch was a nearby miscreant creating a DOS attack by using de-auth packets, but this was quickly dismissed by a quick sniff on Wireshark.

Next was to discover the wireless devices competing with my access point, for this I use Inssider 3, the last free version of the product. Simply run the program, select your wireless card and a list of all discoverable access points display, along with their signal strength.

In this example, it’s clear why the disconnects were happening, my access point was competing a lot of others, including one that was on the same channel and power level as mine. Seeing something like this would normally be a cue to experiment with moving the access point to a different location to try and improve the strength, however for many this is not possible.

Moving onto the Netgear and getting the most power from it. While the web portal blocks the power rating, the command line interface (CLI) is not so sophisticated, but is just as useful in making configuration changes.

Getting access to this involves a Telnet connection. Using Putty, select the Telnet radio box and enter the IP address of the router. The username and password is the same used for the web interface.

To navigate the menus, enter a question mark to see the options that are available. To get to the radio section, enter dot11 radio configure to get to the radio sub menu.

Then default_transmit_power Full to set the radio power. Without fuss the CLI will just accept the command and displays a new line for the next. It’s important to commit the changes but typing exit to finish with the radio sub menu.

Then to exit completely, remove the pre-typed menu location and enter .exit to quit.

To check its successful, log in the web interface once more and the full power setting is populated when visiting the radio settings.

Note: clicking apply on this page with trigger the same region error as before, therefore if changes are to be made the power must be turned back down to half or lower in order to save. To get the full power back, Telnet into the router and repeat the above steps.

Revisiting Inssider, we can see that my access point has gained an advantage over the others for this location. It doesn’t look significant but is enough for my iPhone and other devices to keep a stable wireless connection.

Step 1: Start by downloading the basic version of the drivers from the HP website, choose Windows XP drivers if there are none for Windows 2003

Step 2: Open the executable file, allow it to extract and display the first setup screen. Here, depending on the printer chosen it may let you continue with the setup, or stop the installation there telling you the operating system is not supported.

Whatever the installation screen displays, DO NOT CLOSE THE WINDOW, while its open all the files you need are made available. Next navigate to your temp folder. TIP: Go to Start Menu à Run, and type  %temp%. This will bring up your temp files.

In the temp folder, look for a folder containing the setup files that were extracted as part of the installation, it will usually have .inf files that contain the printer model as part of the filename, below is an example of the drivers to install a HP C4700:

Step 3: At this point its best to copy (not move) the contents of the folder to a more convenient location. When a copy is made, you can close the installation utility as you have all the files in a new location.

Now navigate to Start > Settings > Printers and Faxes, and then start the Add new printer wizard.

After the intro splash, choose “Local printer attached to this computer” and un-check the box for “Automatically detect and install my Plug and Play printer”

Note: Step 4 is for installing a printer over a network, if you are connecting via USB, skip to step 5.

Step 4: Click next, on the next screen you will want to select “Create a new port” and choose “Standard TCP/IP port” from the drop-down menu, as below:

This brings up a new wizard, after the intro splash onto the add port screen, type the IP address of the printer:

NOTE: To save reconfiguration in the future, remember to set the printer to have a static IP address as you are not installing the program that find the printer on a dynamic IP address.

The next screen, leave the settings as a “Standard device type” and “Generic network card”. Clicking next brings you to printer software screen.

Step 5: Click the “Have Disk” button and navigate to the copy of the installation files.

Only .inf files show, and you want to choose the most generic file name that is similar to your device, in this case above hpC4700.inf seems the most obvious.

If the right file has been chosen, you see your printer display as below.

If you get a warning message about a digital signature, choose “Continue Anyways”, but make sure you downloaded the drivers from a reputable site, such as the official HP website.

The installation wizards copies the files, then choose to print a test page to make sure all is well, and your HP printer appears in your printers folder.