i tried a lot with tp-link routers they are rathe slow products but I actually did not tried a net-gear or cisco
what I did I connetected hp dv6 with 100/1000 mbits (gigabit Ethernet) adapter by wire to the router and connected another laptop with tl-wdr3200 dual band usb adapter using the 5 ghz band and transferred a file from laptop A to a laptop B it was about 19.5 MBytes/sec this was the maximum speed I achieved with this router, but when u use software to test through put it will be a shame 15 mbps

but when using the usb port the maximum speed I had was 10.0mbps I hard drive not flash ram attached to the router and creating ftp server and then download the file from web browser with Internet Download Manager but if u copy from the usb storage shared folder u will not get more than 5Mbytes/sec
also I used the 5ghz band

In specification 5GHz: Up to 450Mbps 2.4GHz: Up to 300Mbps but it all depends on devices in your computer (wireless card, hdd).

Yes, the limiting speed will be the lower spec of any two of the wifi devices.

Testing with file transfers is also misleading, as the throughput of the software protocols and hard drive access speed will play a bigger factor than the raw network speed.

You'd think that the hard drive and operating system would be fast enough and the network connection is the slowest link, but you'd be wrong.

Just try a hardwired GigaBit ethernet switch (your Gigabit ports on your router) and transfer between two computers using FTP, using Windows FileShare, even AFP or SCP on Macs. You'll get different speeds based on the protocol. If the overhead of the protocol is high, the transfer speed will suffer. Encrypted protocols like SSH and SCP will slow it down. I think my testing shows FTP to be the fastest protocol, low overhead. But if using SFTP, encrypted, it is slowed down.

On a Gigabit network, copying files using SAMBA (Windows SMB) I get about 180-220 mbps. Higher than 100mbps ethernet, but nowhere near the gigabit (1000mbps) speeds.

So where 300, 450, 600 mbps Wifi speeds help, is where multiple users are doing massive copying. Each user can potentially use just a portion of the available bandwidth, and other users can get relatively speedy responses also. And keep in mind the bandwidth is "Half-Duplex" which means you can't be transmitting while you are receiving. And Wifi protocols will take away some of the bandwidth.

Don't you just love marketing and theoretical maximum speed specifications!

KRowland wrote

On a Gigabit network, copying files using SAMBA (Windows SMB) I get about 180-220 mbps. Higher than 100mbps ethernet, but nowhere near the gigabit (1000mbps) speeds.

I ran another test, I was copying large movie files from one media server to another. Using my MacBoo Pro as the copier. I had two media servers and one Mac all plugged into the TP-Link 3600 Gigabit Dual Band router. I used Finder on OS-X to connect to each server and drilled down to the folders I wanted to copt files from one to the another. Dragging files from one Finder window to the other.

What this means is that the file has to be pulled from the first media server into the MacBook Pro and then back out to the second server. But since Ethernet is Full-Duplex, I was getting an average of 500 mbps in and 500 mbps out simultaneously. Not bad! The servers where running Linux and Samba (Windows File Sharing).

Yah, Pulling files from a Linux partition, through Windows File Sharing, using a Mac.

To make my Tvix player happy , i installed both NFS & SAMBA on my Linux File server.

I only use SAMBA for the windoozes , everything else uses NFS.

/Bingo