While testing Wi-Fi quality and network throughput on FreeBSD 14.3 drivers, I realized that before running any benchmarks, it’s important to document my home LAN topology and the network capacity across its zones. It’s essential to understand how different network technologies work, including the gap between their theoretical throughput and the actual achievable performance.
For example, a Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) connection might advertise speeds up to 1.3 Gbps, but real-world performance is typically much lower due to factors like signal interference, channel width, and protocol overhead. Similarly, a 1 Gbps Ethernet link theoretically provides 1,000 Mbps, but after accounting for TCP/IP overhead and other factors, the actual throughput is closer to 940 Mbps. Another significant factor impacting real-world throughput is the use of Wi-Fi Mesh with wireless backhaul. While mesh systems improve coverage, they often introduce additional latency and bandwidth reduction because each hop between nodes consumes part of the available wireless spectrum for backhaul traffic. This means that, in practice, a device connected to a secondary mesh node (Extender) might experience only half or even less of the primary link’s bandwidth. Knowing these differences helps set realistic expectations and troubleshoot performance issues effectively.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a diagram illustrating both the theoretical and real-world throughput values in my home network setup.
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| Home LAN zones and Network Throughput |
You can find all the details in the remainder of this blog post.