Asus RP-AC56 802.11ac wireless extender review

1. Introduction2. Asus RP-AC56 802.11ac Wireless Extender3. On Screen Display and Setup4. Testing and Results5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

Testing a wireless extender is somewhat different from testing a router. Performance is affected by more than just the distance between the client and the unit you are testing, as there’s a second wireless connection, between the unit and the router itself.

That’s what an extender does. You find an area where your wireless signal is good, set the extender up there, and it gives you extra range, as the name implies. It will not work at all if you place the extender somewhere with poor coverage.

Additionally, the performance will be affected by how fast your router is in general. You cannot get 802.11ac performance from a router that can only do 802.11n speeds. We used a fast AVM Fritz! Box 3490 router, capable of 600Mbit/sec 802.11ac performance.

We placed the extender on the ground floor around five metres beneath our main router on a top floor, made sure it had a good connection to the main router, then measured wireless performance exactly the same way we would as in any router review: one metre, five metres and ten metres away.

To test, we used the Mac software WiFi Perf, running on an iMac connected to the main router via a wired connection, and measured its transfer rates using a 2013 MacBook Pro with a 3×3 802.11ac wireless configuration.

Here are the results:



These results are slightly disappointing, at least compared with the wireless performance of an actual 3×3 802.11ac router, which can manage 600Mbit/sec.

They’re not entirely unexpected. Wireless extenders typically have a lower specification than a router, with a less powerful processor, and less memory, which makes it less capable of dealing with a large number of wireless packets. Also this a 2×2 802.11ac router, so speeds will be a bit lower than with a 3×3 router.

But to make sure we were getting the right results, we ran a few more tests, and completely disabled 802.11n, even though we had made sure our first set of results were connected via 802.11ac.

We also moved the extender to have direct line of sight with the router, 2 metres away.

Here are the brief short-range results of this second test.

They’re slightly better, breaking 200Mbit/sec, but not by much. It does seem the extender is bottlenecking the wireless speeds.

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