Thank you Ignition Design Labs LLC for sending us a Portal for review!

The Portal router was successfully Kickstarted in July of 2016.  In fact, they raised nearly $800,000 from their $160,000 goal.  For as little as $139 early adopters were able to embrace their dreams of faster wireless internet in their multi-story homes.  This 802.11ac router operates on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. What sets the Portal apart from the other routers is its ability to operate in protected portions of the 5GHz radio spectrum that were originally reserved for weather radar systems.  By using these frequencies that other routers are ignoring, you get more dedicated airspace for your streaming needs.  

These frequencies cannot be used by most routers, because the router must support a feature called Dynamic Frequency Selection, or DFS.  DFS is required because certain 5GHz bands are shared with radar systems, and by law, no consumer equipment can be allowed to interfere with radar.  However, the vast majority of people do not live so close to airports or coastlines that interfering with radar systems is likely to occur.  Since this interference is strictly prohibited, it cannot be the clients, but the router itself that determines whether or not to utilize that frequency spectrum.  That is where DFS comes in.

The Portal router has the necessary antennas and radios required to constantly monitor the airwaves for any possible radar transmissions, and if needed, instantly move any Wi-Fi clients to another 5GHz (or even 2.4GHz) band.  It is this, along with some other features, that makes Portal special.  Most DFS enabled devices are enterprise level Wi-Fi equipment; now it's available for consumers at a very reasonable price.

The real benefits of DFS may not be in a typical suburban home use scenario, but in a crowded urban environment.  Since the vast majority of home routers do not support DFS, the 2.4GHz, and now standard 5GHz Wi-Fi bands are becoming crowded as more and more people bring wireless networks closer together in apartment buildings, condos, and so on.  Where DFS comes in is that these regulated but still available bands can be used, which allows the Portal owner to tap into spectrums that almost no one else is using.  Now granted this is somewhat of a race – these bands may well be used up also at some point in the not too distant future – but that is where band steering comes into play.

Band steering is where the router can automatically watch for channel interference levels, and the router itself will automatically change what devices use which band in an effort to keep performance and reliability as high as possible.  This also allows multiple frequency spectrum bands to be utilized at the same time, allowing several demanding guests to stream video, play games, or more, without impacting each other much (assuming your Internet connection can handle it!).

According to the manufacturer, this router can adequately provide Wi-Fi coverage for up to 2500 sq. ft.  If you have a larger home, Portal routers can be daisy-chained for increased coverage.  My house is close to that size, and I was pleased with the Wi-Fi coverage.

While I do not have a large variety of routers to compare the Portal against, I am a Linux System Administrator for my day job, and I know a thing or two about networks.  So, I proceeded to compare this new device against my existing Asus RT-AC68U.  While it is no longer cutting edge, it was one of the very best routers on the market when it was released, and I have been very pleased with it.  It absolutely blows the doors off of the NetGear N router I had before that one in both performance and reliability.  This has been the best router I ever had outside of the Linux one I built myself some years back.  (That one was awesome, but ancient hardware and also ancient Wi-Fi made it too difficult to update.  I also got lazy.)

What I quickly discovered is that not only are no two devices that claim to support 802.11ac alike, but also slight adjustments to position, orientation, and more can have a massive impact in Wi-Fi performance.  Even slightly adjusting the screen changed performance by as much as 20% in some cases in my testing.  Keep this in mind as you look at my results – while I tried to be as scientific as possible, variations are simply impossible to avoid.

The main tool that I used for benchmarking is iperf3.  This open source tool is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as Android, and I used it on all of those platforms.  I used an Intel i7 860 running Ubuntu Linux on Gigabit Ethernet as the server.  For the clients, I used a modified Lenovo Ideapad Y580 running Windows 10 with a swapped out Wi-Fi card for an Intel 7260AC, a 2015 Macbook Pro Retina (thanks day job!), and my Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. I also used my GPD Win for a fourth client in the multi-client test.  Not surprisingly, both Unix-based systems, with the latest Wi-Fi chips, performed the fastest.  The Mac and Samsung were both consistently faster than my Windows laptops, though to be fair, they are both much newer and likely have the most current Wi-Fi chipsets also.

To baseline performance for the most common use case, I started with a simple speedtest.net comparison between the two routers.  I have a 50Mb down/10Mb up rated connection.  This showed negligible differences (all are in units of Mbits/sec):

This is well within any margins of error; for all practical purposes they are identical in this test.

I also tested the WAN interface speed, using direct wired connections on both sides.  I put the Portal in bridge mode.  Since I could not easily test the Asus router's WAN port without disrupting a lot that was going on in the network, I wasn't able to do a direct comparison.  Here is the result: 787Mbits/sec

While I would hope for >900Mbits/sec, it's certainly a respectable result.  Looking online, The Asus doesn't do any better.  The switches on both devices performed admirably, at between 940-944Mbits/sec.  Each run would fluctuate between those numbers.  Considering packet and protocol overhead, no one should expect a full 1Gbit/sec on a 1Gb Ethernet link; these values are right in line with what I would expect.

Next up is the main bulk of what we are here for: the Wi-Fi testing.  As I said before, iperf3 was the chosen tool for bandwidth testing.  I did the default 10 second test.  On the client side, I always added the -P 4 flag to connect with four threads.  This had consistently higher performance than a single thread, especially on the Asus.  All speeds improved with multiple threads, but the Portal was faster with just one thread than the Asus was.  I can't really explain it, but I decided I would stick to 4 threads as standard for these tests.

As I said before, I used three main devices: my Windows laptop, the Macbook Pro, and my Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.  I tested both with the Asus as the main wired router, and either the Asus or Portal in access point mode performing Wi-Fi duties. The Asus has a convenient Wi-Fi on/off switch, which I utilized, and I plugged or unplugged the Portal.  Both were configured with the same access point names and passwords, so it was mostly transparent to any devices on my network, other than a brief outage.  For the record, I have a lot of devices; I have seen well over 20 wireless devices at times show up in my connected devices log.  However, it's entirely possible that not all devices were connected during this test since the children were not home and not everything handles reconnection the same way.

I tested by carrying each laptop/phone to seven different locations.  These locations are:

On tower in closet: within two feet of the router

desk: about 22 feet through a wall, stairs, and fish tank stand

kids table: about 7 feet away, through the wall and fish tank stand

kitchen table: about 7 feet away, through wood floor and dinner table

living room table: about 20 feet away, through wood floor

bedroom dresser: about 25-30 feet away, though 2-3 walls/floors

girl's room desk: about 25-30 feet away, though 4-6 walls/floors

Before I share the results, there is one dirty little secret about Wi-Fi: there are almost no devices that can use more than the double stream dual band connectivity of the Asus.  So the Portal supports up to quad (commonly referred to 4x4), but no individual device goes faster than 2x2 speed, with the very rare 3x3 device out in the wild.  Now, to the results: