# Transfer speed tests: 802.11ac



## howards (Oct 31, 2007)

I just installed a wireless 802.11ac bridge setup to two Tivos. I used two Netgear R6300 routers, one in access point mode and one in bridge mode. Connected to the bridge are a Tivo Premiere 4 and a Tivo Series 2. Additionally, I have a separate Tivo Series 2 connected via a Tivo wireless 802.11g adapter.

It all works great. Thought the performance numbers would be of general interest:

Premiere to PC: a bit over 27Mbps
Series 2 to PC (via bridge): about 10Mpbs
Series 2 to PC (via Tivo adapter): 8.5Mbps

All numbers derived by performing a kmttg transfer. The two Series 2 transfers are probably not directly comparable since the first one used 5Ghz 
transfers while the second one used 2.4Ghz transfers, and I'm sure I have more interference from neighbors in 2.4Ghz range.

Unfortunately, I didn't think to test the performance of the Premiere over the 802.11n Tivo adapter it used to use before I installed the bridge.

Comments on these numbers relative to what others of you are seeing would be welcomed.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

Premiere to PC I routinely get 60 to 80 Mbps over wired and moca connections (have some of each).


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## PCurry57 (Feb 27, 2012)

Premiere to PC with a 5Ghz wireless N 300 Bridge before I upgraded my router to AC I got 40-60 Mbs. As I don't have an AC Bridge yet I don't know that that will improve. Sine the ethernet port on the Premiere is fast ethernet I wouldn't expect much gain. What I do expect is that more traffic can be carried without causing issues requiring buffering while streaming.


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## andyf (Feb 23, 2000)

howards said:


> I just installed a wireless 802.11ac bridge setup to two Tivos. I used two Netgear R6300 routers, one in access point mode and one in bridge mode. Connected to the bridge are a Tivo Premiere 4 and a Tivo Series 2. Additionally, I have a separate Tivo Series 2 connected via a Tivo wireless 802.11g adapter.
> 
> It all works great. Thought the performance numbers would be of general interest:
> 
> ...


Those numbers really are quite bad. Those numbers can be easily achieved with a good 802.11n network, I think I got around 35Mbs with an 802.11n connection before I went MoCa and now get around 65Mbs.


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## compnurd (Oct 6, 2011)

Yeh I agree... I used to get 35-40 with N and get 80-90 with Moca


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

Nobody's defining what transfer mode they are using though. TS transfers are much quicker than PS transfers, and remember the OP is talking specifically about TiVo->PC transfers only. I don't think I've ever seen 80-90 Mbps TiVo->PC transfers even with TS transfers on wired ethernet. MRV can get those speeds but I've not seen that with TTG.


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## howards (Oct 31, 2007)

I am using TS transfer mode. As moyekj said, this is Tivo to PC only. I don't do any Tivo to Tivo streaming.

If some of you believe my numbers for that configuration are slow (and it looks like you do), perhaps you have a suggestion for something to check?


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

For mpeg2 HD TS transfers with TiVo on MoCA & my laptop on 802.11n (5GHz) I can get in range of 40-50 Mbps average. I can get a little higher with laptop using wired ethernet but I think anyone would be hard pressed to get over 60 Mbps average since even with optimal network setup TTG transfers become TiVo CPU limited.

27 Mbps average does sound a little on the low side and you could probably almost double that if you experimented with everything wired.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

howards said:


> I just installed a wireless 802.11ac bridge setup to two Tivos. I used two Netgear R6300 routers, one in access point mode and one in bridge mode. Connected to the bridge are a Tivo Premiere 4 and a Tivo Series 2. Additionally, I have a separate Tivo Series 2 connected via a Tivo wireless 802.11g adapter.
> 
> It all works great. Thought the performance numbers would be of general interest:
> 
> ...


Those Premiere to PC transfer speeds seem very slow.
With Premiere to TiVo Desktop transfers I get 70 to 80Mbps transfer rates. Whether using Ethernet, MoCA, or a wireless N bridge(2.4Ghz and 5Ghz).


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

I just ordered 1000' of Cat6. I'm going to wire up my house or at least 3 locations to start with. Will be easy except for one which requires some drilling maybe a pumpkin cut in the wall so I can drill the hole and then trial and error trying to feed the cable, grab hold of it and pull it. 

WiFI doesn't cut it for extenders so I just can't use it for a whole house solution.

Powerline worked decent for me but had some quirks like having to unplug the powerline module once in awhile and plug back in or having speeds slow when wife gets on treadmill. 

Never tried Moca. IT's expensive and from what I read can have its quirks too.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

Ran a TTG from a 2 tuner Premiere with everything wired (Gbit router + Gbit laptop ethernet + MoCA for 2 tuner Premiere) since I hadn't tested that in a while. Looks to be a little faster than last I checked:
Psych - (s07e13) Nip and Suck It.TiVo: size=4998.25 MB elapsed=0:11:13 (62.30 Mbps)


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## howards (Oct 31, 2007)

Ran some more speed tests. This time I tried a laptop connecting to the same PC server the Tivos connect to. The laptop sits very near the Tivos. Using the laptop's internal 802.11n, I got about 50Mbps. Plugging the laptop into the bridge, I was able to get up to 70Mpbs at times.

Any ideas why a Tivo connected to the same bridge as the laptop would transfer considerably slower than the laptop? This is a Premiere, and people above have indicated that 70Mpbs is something the Tivo ought to be able to achieve.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

howards said:


> Ran some more speed tests. This time I tried a laptop connecting to the same PC server the Tivos connect to. The laptop sits very near the Tivos. Using the laptop's internal 802.11n, I got about 50Mbps. Plugging the laptop into the bridge, I was able to get up to 70Mpbs at times.
> 
> Any ideas why a Tivo connected to the same bridge as the laptop would transfer considerably slower than the laptop? This is a Premiere, and people above have indicated that 70Mpbs is something the Tivo ought to be able to achieve.


The best you can hope to see with wired is ~90Mbps, doing a Premiere to Premiere transfer, which uses the least of the VERY limited CPU processing of a TiVo Premiere. TiVo HDs usually run at half the speed, on any given task. When you do anything other than a Premiere to Premiere transfer, the TiVo CPU gives only what is available to the task, and any other form of transfer requires conversion on-the-fly, while streaming/copying the data, and still only has the "leftovers" of the TiVo's CPU/SOC design, so those 
other tasks get slower, due to the TiVo itself (designed underpowered).

Throw any form of wireless into all that, and you have an infinite number of possible reasons to get slower-than-already-slow speeds. I have so many issues using wireless with anything, than I even wire my laptop, if I can.

I know this isn't very helpful, but I felt it may benefit knowing that your speeds are already crippled, due to TiVo's choice of CPU/SOC, and being too cheap to add in another processor to offload LAN tasks to.


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## PCurry57 (Feb 27, 2012)

andyf said:


> Those numbers really are quite bad. Those numbers can be easily achieved with a good 802.11n network, I think I got around 35Mbs with an 802.11n connection before I went MoCa and now get around 65Mbs.


Actually the Series two numbers won't get much better period 1) series two does not stream and they're networking just doesn't preform so great as the cpu I believe is a single core and somewhat slower by today's standards.


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## howards (Oct 31, 2007)

Thought of a new experiment to try which was very revealing. The target of my kmttg uploads is normally a USB RAID disk, which I assume is not high performance. I temporarily switched the target to my main SATA disk, and the throughput doubled! I'm going to make a post in the kmttg topic about this.


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## JWhites (May 15, 2013)

I agree. On top of that is that the USB ports on the back of the Premiere is USB 2.0 which has a max theoretical speed of 480Mbps and an Ethernet port of 100Mbps (1GBps on the Premiere Elite, Premiere 4, and Premiere XL4) which are slower then the speeds one would see from MoCA 1.1 which is 175Mbps and Wireless AC which is around 1400Mbps. So the connections on the TiVo are themselves limited, ontop of what everyone has already said about the underpowered bottlenecked CPU.

Current gen MoCA 1.1 adapters like the Actiontecs TiVo sells supports that 175Mbps but it's Ethernet port is only 100Mbps anyway so that too is a bottleneck if it's used as a bridge between the router and the coax network at the gateway. A way around that would be doing what FiOS customers are able to do and use a MoCA enabled router.


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## socrplyr (Jul 19, 2006)

JWhites said:


> I agree. On top of that is that the USB ports on the back of the Premiere is USB 2.0 which has a max theoretical speed of 480Mbps and an Ethernet port of 100Mbps (1GBps on the Premiere Elite, Premiere 4, and Premiere XL4) which are slower then the speeds one would see from MoCA 1.1 which is 175Mbps and Wireless AC which is around 1400Mbps. So the connections on the TiVo are themselves limited, ontop of what everyone has already said about the underpowered bottlenecked CPU.
> 
> Current gen MoCA 1.1 adapters like the Actiontecs TiVo sells supports that 175Mbps but it's Ethernet port is only 100Mbps anyway so that too is a bottleneck if it's used as a bridge between the router and the coax network at the gateway. A way around that would be doing what FiOS customers are able to do and use a MoCA enabled router.


Mostly correct, but with a little confusion about the Premiere 4 boxes. These boxes are not capable of 1Gbps. The switch inside is, but the SoC still only has 100Mbps ports. Thus, those receiving near 90 Mbps (under certain conditions) are probably not CPU limited, but network limited (when overhead is included).


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## howards (Oct 31, 2007)

JWhites said:


> I agree. On top of that is that the USB ports on the back of the Premiere is USB 2.0


I'm not using the USB port on the Premiere. The point of this exercise was to install an 802.11ac bridge and use that to hook to the Premiere's Ethernet port.


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## compnurd (Oct 6, 2011)

socrplyr said:


> Mostly correct, but with a little confusion about the Premiere 4 boxes. These boxes are not capable of 1Gbps. The switch inside is, but the SoC still only has 100Mbps ports. Thus, those receiving near 90 Mbps (under certain conditions) are probably not CPU limited, but network limited (when overhead is included).


There are a couple of people who have gotten over 100 in some tests


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## socrplyr (Jul 19, 2006)

compnurd said:


> There are a couple of people who have gotten over 100 in some tests


Then the results were most likely not accurately measured. I have had this discussion before. It is possible to have a very short term estimation be incorrect. A simple method would just accumulated the amount of data received and divide by the difference in time. However, depending on how it gets time stamped the first chunk of data's timestamp could be late (due to other system calls etc). This would make the difference in time too small, and overestimate the rate. Now if you take numerous of these "instantaneous" samples of the rate, you will be biased high (as the function is non-linear and mean(1/x_i)>=1/mean(x_i), with equality only when x_i = x_j for all i,j). Also it can be easily shown in this type of situation that the expectation of any 1/x_i is >= the true rate.
Either way, look at the BCM7413 specs. It has two 100Mbps ports on it. It is extremely doubtful that Tivo would have taken the effort to bond them into a 200Mbps connection.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

socrplyr said:


> Then the results were most likely not accurately measured. I have had this discussion before. It is possible to have a very short term estimation be incorrect. A simple method would just accumulated the amount of data received and divide by the difference in time. However, depending on how it gets time stamped the first chunk of data's timestamp could be late (due to other system calls etc). This would make the difference in time too small, and overestimate the rate. Now if you take numerous of these "instantaneous" samples of the rate, you will be biased high (as the function is non-linear and mean(1/x_i)>=1/mean(x_i), with equality only when x_i = x_j for all i,j). Also it can be easily shown in this type of situation that the expectation of any 1/x_i is >= the true rate.
> Either way, look at the BCM7413 specs. It has two 100Mbps ports on it. It is extremely doubtful that Tivo would have taken the effort to bond them into a 200Mbps connection.


I run my TiVos now with only one ethernet connection from one Elite to my network. Then my second Elite and two Minis are connected over MoCA. My OTA Premere is connected to my second Elite from it's Ethernet port. So for me to transfer to TiVo desktop, each TiVo can only send data through the one ethernet connection on the first Elite.

I only recently tried this with my current setup, but when I was transferring data to TiVo desktop concurrently from my two Elites and OTA only Premire, the data was consistently above 100Mb/s. It fluctuated between 125Mb/s and 140Mb/s. I had never seen speeds that high when transferring from Premiere to Premiere when everything was connected from just Ethernet.. I saw peaks of 130Mb/s but it was not consistently high like I saw last weekend when I did those concurrent TiVo Desktop transfers.


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## socrplyr (Jul 19, 2006)

aaronwt said:


> I run my TiVos now with only one ethernet connection from one Elite to my network. Then my second Elite and two Minis are connected over MoCA. My OTA Premere is connected to my second Elite from it's Ethernet port. So for me to transfer to TiVo desktop, each TiVo can only send data through the one ethernet connection on the first Elite.
> 
> I only recently tried this with my current setup, but when I was transferring data to TiVo desktop concurrently from my two Elites and OTA only Premire, the data was consistently above 100Mb/s. It fluctuated between 125Mb/s and 140Mb/s. I had never seen speeds that high when transferring from Premiere to Premiere when everything was connected from just Ethernet.. I saw peaks of 130Mb/s but it was not consistently high like I saw last weekend when I did those concurrent TiVo Desktop transfers.


Are you referring to the combined transfer rate of all concurrent transfers? If so, that makes perfect sense. However, each individual transfer would be limited below 100Mbps. I did not mean to infer that you couldn't make some use of the 1Gbps switch inside the Premiere 4s. What I meant was that actual access to that specific Tivo's information was limited to 100Mbps.

Ignore the packaging for a second and just consider the hardware present (and I am going to reduce the number of Tivos to 2 for simplicity). Internal to the "gateway" Tivo is a 1Gbps switch. One of its ports is connected at 1Gbps to your home network. Another of its ports is connected at 100Mbps to the SoC of the "gateway" Tivo. A third port is connected to the MoCA ethernet adapter also inside the "gateway" Tivo at an unknown rate (probably 100Mbps though). That means that the "gateway" Tivo can talk to your computer at a max of 100Mbps, while at the same time a Tivo on the other end of the internal MoCA adapter can also talk at that 100Mbps rate (limited for the same reason the "gateway" one is limited). (With both Tivo's transferring to your computer, they would net a maximum of 200Mbps). Now a Premiere 4 is nearly exactly this setup with the 1Gbps ethernet switch, SoC, and MoCA adapter all integrated into the same mainboard. If you believe I misinterpreted your throughput numbers, just let me know. Tivo would have had to put in a significant time and effort to get transfer rates higher than 100Mbps for a single Tivo with the BCM7413 SoC (either adding an addtional network adapter or bonding, both with major drawbacks - cost/power/configuration).


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