The ALFA WiFi Camp Pro 3 dual band WiFi extension system offers improved speed vs. its predecessor, the ALFA WiFi Camp Pro 2. But will the Camp Pro 3 boost the speed of your existing WiFi connection at home or on the road?
If you have purchased the ALFA WiFi Camp Pro 3, you may have decided to give it a test run at home in the same room as your router.
You may be surprised to see even when at 100% signal and not much distance from your home router, your speed through the repeater is SLOWER than when directly connecting your PC to your home router's Wi-Fi signal.
Repeater systems like the ALFA WiFi Camp Pro 3 are designed to take a weak Wi-Fi signal and rebroadcast it (repeat it) as a new Wi-Fi signal to cover additional area where signal could not previously be received well.
While the Camp Pro 3 can boost speed in areas of poor reception, it is a range booster, not a speed booster, and understanding the difference is important. If you are already getting good signal but your speed is slow, this means the network is either at or over capacity, or you are getting the maximum speed the network allows. Using a Camp Pro 3 or any booster in this type of situation will slow speed down because you are routing the signal through a secondary device. When you setup a repeater at close range to a router, you are detouring data packets through an unnecessary route.
The Camp Pro system is designed to boost signal in areas where it is very weak- where you cannot get a connection at all, or the signal is so weak the speed is very slow or the connection drops. In those places, the Camp Pro 3 will boost signal and help make your speed faster and more stable. The Camp Pro 3 also offers dual band capability, meaning you are able to use either the slower 2.4 GHz Network or the faster 5 GHz network when available.
But my home speed is 500 mpbs, I should at least be getting CLOSE to that when testing inside the house, right?
The ALFA WiFi Camp Pro 3 is a 1T1R system, meaning it has 1 Transmit and 1 Receive antenna inside. This allows all its power to be concentrated to this one antenna, instead of divided up among multiple antenna streams.
Modern 802.11ac and WiFi 6 Home routers use multiple streams, sometimes 4 or 6, so that data is sent and received over these multiple streams at the same time. This gives you the super fast fiber optic level speeds you are used to at home, but limits the overall range of the signal. If your goal is to get 100 mbps+ Internet inside your home, the Camp Pro 3 won't do that. In our testing, speeds in homes and places of moderate signal averaged 20-40 mbps. In many campgrounds where your signal reception is just 1 to 2 bars, you may be barely able to load a page or get speed faster than a few mbps. So in those locations, the Camp Pro 3 should provide a good boost.
Military and First Responder 
