Wifi Question

I've been trying to compare wifi products and features. Lately I have realized that most / almost all will not provide you with anything like a specification or description of the actual hardware performance.

Almost all of them will add numbers together that make no sense. Like adding two radios and claiming that the bandwidth is therefore higher...

I get about 170/17 on the best day on the cable modem. The wifi 802.11g spec claims 300mbps and the actual connection to the client claims 280mbps. In a residential environment what is the value of 802.11ac or mu-mimo?

If I was supporting multiple simultaneous connections I can see needing more multi-user bandwidth but even then I have a tough time understanding how a single user can be bottle necked by the WiFi when it has more bandwidth than a cable modem.

Can someone help unconfuse me.

Thanks
T

Something for MU-MIMO

802.11ac is just a faster and better wireless standard, if you already have a 5GHz 802.11n wireless AP and you are satisfied with it, then you should be fine.

Also you are mistaken here, 802.11g allows for a maximum of 54Mbps.

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If your in a residential environment with enough capacity and the connection speed is above what is rated from your ISP then no, upgrading to 802.11/ac won't provide much of an improvement, unless you need to transfer larger amounts data internally, in which case you can saturate the connection to a local server/client machine, also as @Novasty stated 802.11/g is limited to 54Mbps and doesn't have support for the 5GHz band which can be a huge advantage if the 2.4GHz band is congested as the 5GHz has more channels and bandwidth to cope with that.

Have a local storage or sheald streaming device.

Those numbers are under 100% optimum conditions

What upgrading to AC will do is allow to do is have better connection with less reception.

Your power cap is still the same as a consumer, so your range won't really be better. Just your connection more efficient

At higher distances going to 2.4 on AC is best as long as you don't live in a high rise or something. 2.4 carries much better but it will depend on the specifics of your layout. As you get closer to the router and add more interference from other devices* the more likely 5.0 would be optimum

Lot's of things use 2.4 that aren't really networking realted

Thanks. I meant n not g for 300mbps. I have a good signal and even internal streaming of video is acceptable over wifi. I have a Ubiquiti wifi AP that does n well in the 2ghz range throughout the house. It really wasn't clear to me what swapping in an 802.11ac AP in the house would mean in terms of improvement.

It sounds like better numbers but not a lot of real world improvement for my use cases. If I were to stream 4k 60fps video from the basement to somewhere in the house it might make more sense to me or maybe even uncompressed DVDs but if I did I would probably start trying to figure out how to pull cat6a and upgrade my wired network rather than playing the wifi game. mu-mimo seems very cool but I don't have any devices that would leverage and there don't seem to be a lot beyond 2x2.

In the home, we don't have any direct device to device copy of multi-GB files so achieving the 1000mbps of the wired network isn't much of a priority. All my work devices run off the same 24 port switch and although I've ordered a couple of 10gb NICs for fast transfer between my workstation and NAS the only time I saturate the network is when I am moving one of my videos from the workstation to the san.

Thanks for de-muddling me. Cool solutions but not much of a use for them right now.

Uhhhhhhh I thought G was like 54, then B was like 30 and A was 11. N gets to 150 and AC gets to 300+

In polite company, this is called marketing. In reality, it is a bold faced lie.

They sum up the maximum theoretical throughput of all on-board radios and then they add an additional +/- 10% extra, for good measure. Where does the extra 10% come from? They pull that out of their ass, of course!

First, strip off that 10% and then in the real world, figure on realizing a maximum of 2/3 of the resulting theoretical throughput.

What you need to understand about wireless specs is that the radios can only talk to one device at a time and before AC they were a half duplex connection. Having said that your connection to the internet could be easily saturated by a 5Ghz N900 Card. So long as no one else is also using the AP.

I get about 145 down and can use every bit of it via my older ASUS RT-N66U. When I got my NAS I quickly realized the value of AC on my network.

As a rule of thumb take whatever speed they claim and half it, that is pretty much the absolute maximum you could get under perfect conditions. I'd say you could expect under normal conditions about one third or even one quarter of whatever speeds they claim.