Technology

Those "lag spikes" are almost always a result of content servers, load balancing, and possibly even client system resources. Or even just a crappy modem.

A quick overview of an average LAN is:

• Clients connect to access points. This might be wifi, it might be an ethernet cable
• Those access points connect to Network Switches
• Those Switches connect to something that handles routing of packets. This is literally a router, but that term is overloaded so note the lowercase 'r'
• Eventually, everything connects to a Firewall which uses NAT to make it look like everything is one giant computer. This gets a bit weird when you move on to ipv6 but that breaks every bit of software at this point so whatever.
• Your Firewall then connects to a Modem which then connects to the fat internet tubes.

A "Router" generally handles everything up to the Modem. For a consumer/household, this is fine. Because no matter how many streams of Frasier you have running on your desktop, you aren't actually generating that much traffic. Even a server isn't going to generate that much traffic (unless you are speccing it out specifically with multiple NICs and so forth). Hell, your OS is more likely to fall over before you make any decent Router break a sweat. Your crappy Netgear can likely handle a LOT more than the god awful piece of crap modem Comcast rents out.

The difference between consumer and enterprise is how many computers are involved. Because yes, if you add enough clients you can stress things. But in that case, we are talking closer to hundreds of clients than three or four kids who are on their phone and their tablet at the same time. Which, again, you are either a network sicko building a bespoke solution or you just pay the Ubiquiti tax.

(And, as an aside, it usually isn't even the network hardware that falls over in hotels. It is their captive portal. And it very much violates a lot of the terms of staying at a hotel and can be considered "hacking" for legal reasons but... if you know the trick to forcing a reboot you can usually fix the network for the entire hotel for the next couple days).

And if we then consider the WAN (internet), the usual path these days is to then connect to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that is effectively a bunch of small relatively local servers that mirror other parts of the internet. Cloudflare is probably the most famous. And a lot of those "Prove you are a human" checks are kind of masking the fetching of data (which doubles as a way to protect against DDOS attacks). This is almost definitely where those "lag spikes" came from, not your hardware.

I am just trying to better understand this stuff, so I have to ask if seeing how long it takes for a client device to accomplish a certain task wouldn’t be better than just glancing over the average Mbps in a graph? That’s what most publications are showing.

That is an incredibly user specific review. That doesn't necessarily make it bad, but "how fast can I download an episode of Frasier" provides a subset of the amount of information you get from "what speeds does this router support?"

But it sounds like what you want is a "review" of a full network (hardware) stack. And... that is again, not something you can get online. That is what you literally pay someone to come over and check out your building for. Because your wifi? That is going to be heavily impacted by where you place the access point, what you have in your walls, etc. Same with your modem (almost always a piece of crap) and even how many times the comcast tech spliced off your coax before it even gets to the box.

Because, for a router? What matters is a controlled-ish environment and then how many packets it can process per second. And just measuring average speed over a large file transfer is probably the best way to get that as it normalizes all the CDN and stack shenanigans.

Adding "more clients" mostly just lets you find out how your traffic is being routed to said CDN while not providing much more data than just a sustained high speed transfer would.

In case it is not obvious, I am definitely a home networking sicko who decided an enterprise level solution was the cost effective way to set up a mesh network for wifi coverage (and... it will come out cheaper when I upgrade my access points in a few years). I've never found a need to test "number of clients" because I know that even with my complete mess oh a DHCP table, it is nothing. What I do do is local transfers of large files between clients on different setups. So I will connect my laptop to the wifi and download some files from my NAS. Then I'll do the same with a wired connection to a few different Switches. And then I'll just have Steam download a game or two to make sure my modem isn't a piece of crap.