The next two benchmark runs took place inside my home theater. This is a room-within-a-room design, with four walls of 2-by-4 framing and drywall inside four walls of 2-by-6 framing and drywall, with about 6 inches of dead air and fiberglass insulation separating them. My intent was to optimize the room's acoustics, not to build a , but many lesser routers and other wireless devices have had trouble penetrating it. However, none of the 802.11ac routers I tested had any difficulty reaching the client in this room. On this benchmark, Buffalo's router finished dead last, delivering less than half the throughput of its top-performing rivals.

Since many people will want to connect the gear in their home entertainment system to an 802.11ac network, I decided to measure TCP throughput with the wireless bridge inside the built-in equipment cabinet in my home theater (the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall cabinet is constructed from cabinet-grade plywood, including the back). The WZR-D1800H's performance looks a little better in , but only because the Belkin shed so much throughput on this measure while the Buffalo held steady. I was able to wirelessly mount and stream a Blu-ray ISO image of the movie Spiderman 3 from a Windows Home Server 2011 machine in my home office to a home-theater PC in that entertainment center, including its high-definition soundtrack.

As depicts, the WZR-D1800's performance improved considerably when I moved the client and the wireless bridge to the first of my two outdoor test locations--an exterior patio enclosed by three walls and one half wall with glass windows. In the real world, I doubt that anyone would try to set up a media bridge outdoors because dragging the bridge and finding an outlet (and likely an extension cord) are too inconvenient. On this measure, the Buffalo presented no threat to the top two routers I tested, the and the .

When I moved the client and bridge to my most challenging outdoor location, separating them from the router by 75 feet, with three insulated interior walls and one insulated exterior wall (clad on one side with fiber-cement lapboard) between them, the WZR-D1800H slipped to last place behind the Belkin AC 1200 DB, delivering TCP throughput of just 48 mbps.