Battle of the Wi-Fi 6 phones S10 vs iPhone 11 which is fastest?

I now have both a Samsung Galaxy S10e and a iPhone 11 pro in house along with some of the best Wi-Fi 6 access points. I wanted to compare speeds at 3 locations in my home using iPerf and see what the differences are when connecting to a 4×43 Wi-Fi 6 Access Point the EnGenius ECW230.

I setup the ECW230 on a clear 5Ghz 80Mhz channel in my office and first tested at 5 feet away sitting in a Qi charger. The iPhone averaged 550Mbps while the S10 averaged 650Mbps. The difference was the iPhone speed was very consistent while the S10 started lower and ramped up.

iPhone
iPhone 11 Pro 5 feet from AP on charger
S10e 5 feet from AP on charger

Next I moved the handsets to a position 25 feet away with line of sight to the ECW230 . The iPhone averaged 325Mbps and the S10 about 360Mbps again the iPhone was more consistent.

iPhone 11 Pro 25 feet from AP
S10 25 feet from AP

Lastly I moved the phones 50 feet away from the ECW230 there were several walls in between. Here the iPhone won out it averaged 90Mbps while the S10 did 45Mbps.

iPhone 11 Pro 50 feet from AP
S10 50 feet from AP

The good news is Wi-Fi 6 clients perform really well at range and we have even seen speed improvements in Wi-Fi 5 Clients connecting to a Wi-Fi 6 Access Point. Even at 50 feet there is still plenty of throughput to stream 4K Ultra HD with HDR on Netflix (25Mbps).

It is also a great time to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 with the 2 major phone brands supporting it. We have the ECW230 in stock here it is cloud manged and is great for business or home use.

The iPhone 11 doesn’t have 5G, and that’s totally fine because it has Wi-Fi 6!

The iPhone 11 specs were just announced and as expected it doesn’t support 5G. While 5G is all the rage right now, the technology is still very much in its infancy don’t expect coverage in anything but the largest city’s until 2021. Furthermore adding 5G to a phone requires bulky antennas and power hungry chipsets and this point.

More importantly all iPhone 11’s support Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax)! Wi-Fi 6 will give the iPhone 11 super fast gigabit speeds while increasing range, speed at range and battery life. See our testing of the Samsung Galaxy S10. Offloading your data from the costly cellular networks to Wi-Fi 6 will always be faster and will not incur a monthly charge per device.

Now to use the iPhone 11 at its full potential you will need Wi-Fi 6 access points. We have been testing several and the EnGenius EWS377AP is very good. For high density situations look at the Ruckus R730 or new R750.

Contact me with any questions about designing your Wi-Fi network to be optimized for Wi-Fi 6.

8×8 MIMO Wi-Fi 6 Range Testing with the Ruckus R730

I wanted to test if the additional MIMO radio chains on a Wi-Fi 6 Access Point improve speed at distance even for a 2×2 MIMO Wi-Fi client like a smartphone. I setup a Ruckus R730 802.11ax Access Point with zonedirector firmware 10.3 using a external power supply for full 8×8 capability on a clear 80Mhz channel at 5Ghz. This is currently the highest capacity Wi-Fi 6 AP on the market.

Next I placed a Samsung Galaxy S10 at my 50 foot indoor test location running a iperf server app. Here are the results I saw an average of 200Mbps throughput with spikes to 230Mbps and lows of 150Mbps.

When we compare this to my test with the EnGenius 4×4 Wi-Fi 6 EWS377AP where we saw a 160Mbps average at the same location we can see those additional radio chains do not go unused. We saw a 40Mbps bump in single client performance with the Ruckus R730! Some of this can be attributed to the beamflex antenna elements I am sure.

Wi-Fi 6 Access Point Client Speed at Range Testing

To continue with my real world Wi-Fi 6 testing series with the EnGenius EWS377AP I wanted to do some indoor speed at distance tests. I am testing actual throughput using a iperf client on a GbE wired desktop and a iperf server app on the smartphone.

I first tested the Wi-Fi 6 Samsung Galaxy S10e I placed it 50 feet from the EWS377AP the Wi-Fi was passing through several walls furniture etc here are the results. I saw average of 160Mbps with spikes to to 176Mbps. Plenty of throughput to stream netflix at 4k (25Mbps) or do just about anything else over Wi-Fi.

Next I wanted to see the difference with a Wi-Fi 5 client the iPhone Xs. I placed the iPhone in the same position an reran the throughput test. This time we averaged 150Mbps with spikes up to 159Mbps.

So in real world distance testing a Wi-Fi 6 AP / Wi-Fi 6 Client edges out Wi-Fi 6 AP / Wi-Fi 5 client with a gain of ~10Mbps not as drastic as the 200Mbs difference we saw at 5 feet but still an improvement. And as we saw in our Wi-Fi 6 AP vs Wi-Fi 5 AP testing having a Wi-Fi 6 AP like the EnGenius EWS377AP can improve overall speed for all Wi-Fi devices.

To back up the Wi-Fi 6 AP testing I went back and did the same test with a Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) AP a 4×4 MIMO Ruckus R720. Here are the are the results at the same location.

First I tested the Wi-Fi 5 client the iPhone Xs I was only able to average about 35Mbps.

Next I tested the Samsung Galaxy S10 the Wi-Fi 6 client this did better at 65Mbps average.

So in conclusion we see a big speed at range improvement with a Wi-Fi 6 AP even with a Wi-Fi 5 client we saw over 100Mbps throughput improvement over a similar Wi-Fi 5 AP!