i'm using ac23 as my primary 5g, ac23's 2.4g is also very good but since i have a better 2.4g router i will use it, it also works to compensate for ac23's bad lan port performance
i think the most important thing is the router placement location because i find that ac23 does not work very well when placed on same floor as PC
i always believed in placing the router at middle of staircase so it has been fine for me
the device link speed will be lower but there is little impact and little difference in actual usage and for 100mbps line is not a problem
i have openwrt softrouter to shape traffic i even think 100mbps broadband will remain relevant for many more years
i see that people say tenda ac18 can reach higher on speedtest but response speed (processor speed) is much more important to me than speed ceiling (wifi chipset capability)
redmi ax6 (good value) will bring faster 5g to my setup but to support it i need to replace my softrouter and probably also desktop adapter, no urgency as i can fallback to cable if i need the speed
here's the comparison of my experience with the most common wifi 5 chipset hardware
AC23
(+) able to use cat8 cable on wan port
(+) better visual quality (than 3x3 TP1900 which has faster processor) when loading youtube, twitch live streaming able to maintain highres on auto
(+) combine with rtl8812bu usb adapter (realtek chipset router-adapter combination) seems to produce better latency performance in gaming
(-) lan port performance worst among the 3 (using cat7 cable suspect can overcome by using cat5e/cat6 but did not test extensively)
(-) if router is placed on same floor as client performance isn't good and can't really feel the speed ac23 seems to be tuned for long range
D191G (TP1900 solution same as Archer C80)
(+) 1.2ghz processor makes it the fastest in terms of responsiveness
(+) fastest 2.4g among the 3 because of fast processor and 2.4g is 3x3
(+) decent lan port performance but dir882 is still better by quite a bit
(-) seems that 3x3 5g is still not good enough for watching twitch live stream need a 4x4
(-) using cat8 cable will cause visual corruption seems it works best with cat5e
DIR-882 (MT7621+7615 solution)
(+) best lan port performance among the 3 for gaming
(+) support dfs channels
(+) can install openwrt
(-) slow processor single core speed makes everything feel slow
(-) game graphics look uglier due to the slow processor
(-) once openwrt is installed lose the ethernet performance advantage (qos conflict with hwnat)
(-) open source wifi driver also a little weaker than stock
(-) ugreen cat8 24awg cable causes visual corruption but vention cat8 28awg seems fine
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I just got myself an AC23 2 days back and set it up. Unfortunately, all the "wall killing" and extra long range wasn't the case. Comparing with my old DLink 868-L, the older DLink performed much better in terms of max 5GHz and similar performance in terms of range. This is especially surprising considering that the 868-L only has internal antenna vs AC23 which has 7 huge external antenna.
P/S: It is a Malaysia set with the latest firmware installed.