I just thought that I should share this WiFi benchmark info that I just gathered. It may perhaps be useful to someone, in particular new Kodi users who have just been gifted with a TV box or stick this holiday season.
Test environment:
I live in a slightly upscale apartment complex. Nowadays there are at least two dozen different things in my general vicinity that I could, in theory, connect to on the 2.4GHz band. In other words, where I am the 2.4GHz band is very crowded. The 5GHz band, no so much.
I have a linksys E4200 gigabit dual band WiFi router in the second bedroom / office which is smack up against the wall between that room and the living room. In all cases, my tests were performed by checking the speed between this E4200 and the devices I have in the living room, i.e. one wall and about 12 feet away. In the livingroom, next to the TV, I have a new Belink MiniMX III Android TV box. This has built-in 2.4GHz WiFi and also a gigabit “hardwired” ethernet port on the back which can optionally be used. Sitting right next to that, I also have a Linksys WUMC710 “media connector” thing. This thing can speak either 802.11ac or 802.11n, but it can only communicate on the (less crowded) 5GHz band.
I made four bandwidth tests using iperf. I checked the bandwidth when the Beelink TV box was booted normally, to Android, and also when it was booted to LibreELEC. I also tested using the Beelink’s built-in 2.4GHz WiFi and with it instead “hardwired” to the Linksys WUMC710 sitting right next to it. The results were rather surprising:
LibreELEC + Linksys WUMC710: 160Mbps
Android + Linksys WUMC710: 137Mbps
LibreELEC + Beelink built-in 2.4GHz Wifi: 32.7Mbps
Android + Beelink built-in 2.4GHz Wifi: 10.1Mbps
Conclusions:
Either the built-in 2.4GHz Wifi on this particular small & cheap Chinese TV box is really atrocious in terms of its performance, or maybe that’s true of all small TV boxes, or maybe in my specific very noisy 2.4GHz environment, it just isn’t possible to get much bandwidth on the 2.4GHz band, even just sending through one wall and 12 feet away.
Obviously, LibreELEC is significantly superior to the built-in Android firmware on this box in terms of how well it performs on networking tasks generally, and also in terms of how well it performs with the built-in WiFi hardware on this box specifically. Indeed, the difference is stark and dramatic in the case where only the built-in WiFi is used.
Typically, “HD” content being streamed in from the Internet will only need 6-7Mbps, so in that case even the worst results shown above should, in theory, be adequate. Note however that the spec for DVDs says that these are allowed to hit up to 10.08 Mbps, but in practice most generally don’t exceed 7–8 Mbps. So again, for DVD rips, all the above bandwidth figures should be adequate. BluRay is a different story, of course. For those, the specs allow data rates up to 54Mbps, so in my particular (noisy) environment, based on the above iperf results, WiFi streaming of a BuyRay rip would be unlikely to yield acceptable results without the use of the separate Linksys “Media Connector” box, or some other means of achieving better bandwidth (e.g. powerline networking gear).
As I said, I am posting all this info in the hopes that it may perhaps be helpful to others. (I know that when i personally started using Kodi, this entire topic of WiFi bandwidth was rather totally mystifying, and there seemed to be very little in the way of real world benchmarking data lying around which would help a newbie to decide what hardware to buy.)
P.S. Humorously, the Linksys WUMV710 is about four times the volume of the Beelink box. The WUMV710 is still only a bit smaller than the size of an average hardcover book, but it dwarfs the Beelink TV box by comparison.