iPhone 6 WiFi speed slower than iPad Air

[donawalt]

It seems a lot of people are reporting slow WiFi speeds, maybe it's an iOS 8 issue. But I sat my iPad Air and iPhone 6 right next to each other about 15 feet from the router, and did a number of tests - download speed only, th iPhone is 50% of the speed of the iPad Air. Both are running iOS 8. It's not unusable, the results are:

iPad Air: ~ 97 Mbps (2.4GHz), ~112Mbps (5 GHz)
iPhone 6: ~ 56 Mbps (2.4GHz), ~61Mbps (5 GHz)

I have restarted the router, changed its channel several times, ensured it is on latest firmware (it is a late model router, Asus RT-AC68U).

I am on WPA-2 personal

I have reset network settings, hard reset the phone.

I am only 2 days away from a fresh install, and I noticed this speed pretty quickly, so I am not inclined to reset all data and try again.

So many people seem to be reporting this issue I guess it's worth a wait to see if iOS 8.1 fixes it. I have seen a lot of people who have gone through 3 phones and it still happens, some have 2 phones side by side, one exhibits the problem the other does not.

EDIT: on the same WiFi network, my laptop gets 170-180 Mbps down. So maybe both are slow, I don't know.

 

[donawalt]

I just tested this with my old iPhone 5s, and I found out something very interesting. The 6 is about 10% faster than the 5s. Maybe I made a wrong assumption, I thought the iPhone 6 would leapfrog the iPad Air in WiFi performance since it is newer. Maybe there is electronics in the iPad Air that keep it faster than the phones? Does anyone know?

 

[donawalt]

The mystery continues, I found this for the iPad Air, so it should be double the 5s as the 5s does not have MIMO technology:What Apple is providing is a speed boost to the now thoroughly established 802.11n networking standard in the form of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) smart antenna technology. Like many Wi-Fi routers on the market the iPad Air has dual antennas, allowing it to wend two parallel paths over the unlicensed airwaves. The MIMO implementation will double the speeds at which the iPad can access Wi-Fi networks, according to Apple.


While there are a number of articles rumoring the dual-antenna MIMO technology for the iPhone 6 and 6+ PRIOR to their release, I have only been able to find one site with an article on this AFTER the 6's came out, and it says the 6 and 6+ do NOT have the MIMO technology.


So the answer may be - expect the 6 to be slightly faster than the 5s in real world, but not as fast as the iPad Air with MIMO?