This is perhaps a bit of an odd title for a blog post but it pretty much describes an interesting phenomenon I recently discovered. Believe it or not, but I've been using an old WRT54 802.11g based Wi-Fi router at home simply because of the fact that it was stable compared to my DSL router's built in Wi-Fi and from a performance point of view it was not much slower. In practice I got around 20 Mbit/s out of that setup which was still o.k. for most uses but slower than my VDSL line at 25 Mbit/s in downlink and 5 Mbit/s in uplink. I therefore decided recently that it was time to get a well performing 802.11n router to be at last able to transfer things at line speed.
So I said bye bye to my Linksys WRT54 and hello to a Netgear WRT-3700 that I still had as a backup for the connectivity solution with bandwidth shaping for larger scale meetings. I was also thinking about buying a 802.11ac access point but my notebook only has an 802.11n Wi-Fi card so it wouldn't be worth the while for the moment. My first attempts to get to the full 25 Mbit/s my VDSL line offers over Wi-Fi were quite disappointing. Even thought the Wi-Fi access point has an 802.11n interface, I still couldn't get far beyond 20 Mbit/s I also got with the old 802.11g equipment. So I started experimenting with the orientation of the router and used the optional stand to turn the router 90 degrees around as shown in the image on the left. And suddenly I could reach a sustained throughput of 80 Mbit/s. By just turning the router by 90 degrees. So much for directional antenna output…