Seriously, I'm not kidding! This tiny Raspberry Pi
gets faster WiFi speeds than my brand new M2 MacBook Air.
Here they are running a bandwidth test side-by-side,
the Pi is getting 1.5 gigabits, while the MacBook can only muster
one hundred and thirty megabits. "But that's not right!" I hear you say.
And you're right. Realistically, once I tune everything better, the difference is a lot
smaller. But the Pi still wins: if I head into my office, and tweak the WiFi settings a bit more,
the Pi can still pump out a gigabit, but the MacBook Air? Just about 700 Megabits.
But how can a Raspberry Pi beat the newest Mac? Well,
this isn't the typical Raspberry Pi. This is a Compute Module. It has these special
connectors on the back that give me access to the Pi's high speed PCI Express bus.
And that means I can install a way faster WiFi chip, like this Intel AX210.
On the MacBook Air? I get whatever Apple gives me.
And even though this laptop is less than a year old, Apple put WiFi 6 inside it.
The Intel adapter? It's using WiFi 6 E.
But just adding an E doesn't seem like much of a difference. Plus,
Apple must have a good reason for sticking with older WiFi 6, right?
Ehhh... The whole reason
I'm doing this video is because earlier this year, I did a video about 2.5 Gigabit networking. When
I upgraded my homelab, I also upgraded my home's WiFi to faster WiFi 6, or 802.11ax.
WiFi 6 uses two wireless frequencies for data, 2.4, and 5 Gigahertz. Using some radio magic,
WiFi 6 can in ideal circumstances get over a gigabit. But that's really hard to get in
the real world, especially since most places there are dozens of 5 Gigahertz WiFi networks.
But WiFi 6 E adds on a third frequency, 6 Gigahertz. And it's a little weird,
because you'd think that would've happened when WiFi turned 6. But naming things is hard,
and maybe it wasn't ready in time.
Anyway, when I upgraded my WiFi,
I installed this Netgear Wireless Access Point. It's the WAX620, and it works great!
I don't like how Netgear tries pushing their Insight cloud management service...
but other than that I thought this thing was the best value if you want
a reliable upgrade for your home WiFi. My M1 MacBook Air got around 700 Megabits on it.
For WiFi? That's pretty good.
But when Netgear's marketing department saw that video, they said I should upgrade to
their faster WiFi 6 E Access Point, and I agreed, so they sent me this.
This is the WAX630E, and it's definitely bigger and heavier than it's little WiFi 6 brother.
It also costs about twice as much! Since Netgear sent it to me and I didn't pay for it,
though, I'm marking this video as sponsored.
They didn't pay me anything, and they have no control over what I'm saying, but I wanna be clear
about my relationship with Netgear, and that's why you saw the little sponsored thing on this video.
With all the size and heft, this thing adds on the 6 Gigahertz band,
and supports almost 500 connected clients. For a home user like me,
the 256 I got with my old Access Point was already plenty, so this thing is just flexing now.
Flipping it over on its back, you can see the space for a custom mounting
bracket here. And on the bottom there are two network ports and
a power jack. I already wired up my house for 2.5 Gigabit PoE++,
which means I can power this thing all through one Ethernet cable that runs down to my basement.
And this thing actually requires the plus-plus, the highest level of PoE. If you just have
a PoE+ switch, that's not enough and the AP runs, but in a low power mode.
The second network port is a 1 gigabit LAN port. It's not helpful for most installs,
and I won't be using it here, but it can be convenient for testing.
Actually installing the thing in my house was easy this time around,
since all I had to do was swap out mounting hardware with the old one. The hard work of
fishing the cable through the wall was already done by Red Shirt Jeff.
Install was easy, but when it comes to configuration, it wasn't perfect.
It's nice they include a free 1-year subscription to their cloud Insight
service... But I like to manage everything locally. And luckily Netgear still supports that.
After the 630E booted up, I selected the NETGEAR SETUP WiFi network,
and used the 'sharedsecret' password to connect. Then I logged in with the default admin account.
But when I tried this 'Day Zero Easy Setup', it seemed to work,
but then it just kicked me back to the setup wizard. It actually did that three times!
Eventually I did get logged in, but I kept getting this 'Internal error.'
That problem didn't go away until I updated the firmware and reset it yet again, a fourth time.
So maybe just the factory firmware I had on mine was the problem, not too sure.
Besides that, the interface was easy enough and I set up three SSIDs,
one for 2.4 Gigahertz, one for 5 Gigahertz, and one for 6 Gigahertz.
And before I deployed it upstairs for good, I set it up on top of my rack in the basement.
Having it down here means I can do close-range benchmarking in a less
noisy radio environment. Being a little bit underground blocks out some of the
dozen or so WiFi signals from my neighbors and makes the testing more consistent.
I put my M2 MacBook Air on the right, and the Raspberry Pi with the Intel WiFi card on the
left. I ran a number of benchmarks, mostly using a tool called `iperf3`.
And at first, I saw the Pi and my Mac were both only getting around
100 Megabits per second. So I dug a little deeper and found out the Pi was connecting
on the 5 GHz band, instead of 6 GHz, so it wasn't getting any advantage.
And if I check on the MacBook Air, it's also on the 5 GHz band, with a great signal.
So after a bunch of digging around, I found out to actually use WiFi 6E on a Raspberry
Pi—or any Linux laptop with the latest hardware—I had to make a couple changes.
First I had to upgrade the Wireless software,
WPA Supplicant. I upgraded from the built in 2.9 version to 2.10, but that's not enough.
I also had to change the connection settings a little bit so the Pi could
communicate using WPA3 Personal encryption. I have a whole blog post on how I did that,
and you can check it out in the description. There's also a guide for making this Intel WiFi
card work on the Pi. You have to recompile the Linux kernel to do it right now,
and hey! I have a shirt for that. Check it out on redshirtjeff.com.
But once I did all that, I got it connected... but it was only using 80 Megahertz of bandwidth.
WiFi 6E can use up to 160 Megahertz, and more bandwidth equals more speed—more on that later.
So I found the setting to force 160 Megahertz in Netgear's settings, and did it.
And look at that! 1.5 Gigabits per second, over WiFi, to the Raspberry Pi.
And for some reason, when I leave the 5 Gigahertz radio in auto-negotiation mode, it seems to
throttle down to 20 or 40 Megahertz, even though the only thing connected to it is my MacBook Air.
And that means the poor Mac is only getting like 100 Megabits sometimes!
I also tried a bidirectional test, where traffic is maxed out both ways,
and the Pi could keep up with over a gigabit in total, which is pretty good,
and still beats the MacBook Air's basic single direction test.
I moved a little further away to my desk,
and forced the 5 Gigahertz network to use 80 Megahertz of bandwidth. And now,
the Mac can get around 700 megabits, but the Pi is still faster, getting over a gigabit.
So WiFi 6E is FAST. And WiFi 7 promises to be even faster, with some improvements like going
from 1024 to 4096 QAM. I'm not gonna dive into the gory details here, but think of it like this. If
you have the processing power in hardware, you can do some really fancy things with a radio signal.
Like with QAM, the WiFi chip can analyze phase, frequency, and amplitude of a wireless signal.
The better the signal and the faster the WiFi chip, the more bits it can pack in.
There are some other fun word soups involved,
like TWT, OFDMA, BSS Coloring, and MU-MIMO, but in essence,
having faster and more advanced WiFi chips means you can get more data using the same frequency.
But WiFi 6E and WiFi 7 add another trick: the 6 Gigahertz wireless spectrum.
And what better way to learn about it than to ask a radio engineer! My Dad has dealt with RF,
or Radio Frequency, his entire career. We actually just took a really cool tour of a
giant FM broadcast tower called the Supertower, and you can see that on
the Geerling Engineering YouTube channel. Go subscribe if you haven't seen it yet.
Whether it's 1 million watts of FM radio, or milliwatts of WiFi, RF obeys the laws of physics.
I asked my Dad why 6 Gigahertz is so important,
and he said at the most basic level, WiFi 6E and WiFi 7 have two major advantages:
First, that 6 gigahertz spectrum is clean. Right now, since so few people have the latest WiFi,
anyone who runs on 6 Gigahertz has a lot less interference to deal with.
And less interference means less noise. Less noise means a stronger signal,
and more of the magic like QAM can happen.
Second, increasing the available bandwidth per channel makes things
way faster. Like in our video at the tower site,
he showed me how digital radio signals are crammed into two 'sidebands' on the main analog signal.
FM radio can only deliver a few hundred kilobits of data because
those sidebands only take up a hundred or so Kilohertz of bandwidth. The 160
Megahertz for WiFi 6E? That's over one thousand times more bandwidth!
And I'd love to show you that visually,
but not even this super-expensive scope can measure RF signals in the 6 gigahertz range.
My Dad said on top of all the physics, having more processing power and better algorithms
adds on even more speed, so the future is definitely bright for WiFi 7 and beyond!
But he did caution there are a couple downsides.
First, antenna design has to change to tune things for 6 Gigahertz. So not every computer
will get the full speed, especially if you're upgrading from WiFi 5 or 6.
Also, higher frequencies means lower penetration. That means you won't get
the same amount of range out of 6 Gigahertz as you do 2.4. So mesh WiFi—where you have
a bunch of access points around your house—will probably get even more popular as people upgrade.
If you're looking for the most bang for your buck, the sweet spot is still WiFi 6. A lotta
devices don't even support that yet, much less 6E. And with how much more expensive
most 6E gear is, unless you really need it, I'd hold off, at least for a homelab.
So a few conclusions: first, the WAX630E works great,
minus a little frustration with the firmware it shipped with.
Second, WiFi 6E and WiFi 7 make wireless networking
fast enough to be competitive with at least gigabit wired networks.
And finally, until Apple upgrades their computers, I can confidently say, without any clickbait,
that my Raspberry Pi is faster than any Mac on the market today. At least when it comes to WiFi.
Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.