Quote:
Originally Posted by Mussels
well wifi always does that dodgy full duplex marketing trick, so if they say its 1300Mb they mean both directions combined, so its more like 650Mb
|
Eh? What are you on about?
It's nothing about full duplex, it's about the theoretical bandwidth minus overheads etc.
Even wired Ethernet have overheads, they're just not as high as they are when it comes to Wi-Fi.
Because it's a consumer technology the transmission power is limited to silly low amounts, a more powerful transmitter would give you the kind of speeds that are being claimed in combination with better antenna designs.
I've seen Wi-Fi setups with a range of multiple kilometres using a special type of antenna. Sadly that company didn't understand how to promote their technology and it never really took off, but they were fairly compact antennas compared to the stuff used for point to point Wi-Fi over long distance.
You be glad you never tested 802.11a in its early days, it had a range of about 5m, if you were lucky and there was nothing between you and the access point.
It also depends on the type of hardware you have, as to even have a chance of getting the kind of speeds that are being advertised you need 3x3 MIMO setups on both sides, or even better 4x4 MIMO, but as far as I'm aware only Quantenna offers that.
802.11ac supports up to 8 antennas and beamforming which should help improve the range.
That said, looking at the graph here
http://www.5gwifi.org/advantages-of-80211ac.php after about 10m the speed drops off sharply, but apparently we can expect better range than 2.4GHz 802.11n.
Another neat feature of 802.11ac is that it supports something called MU-MIMO that allows multiple users to stream data simultaneously instead of having to share data streams with all the connected users. This should reduce latency and potentially increase speeds as well, although it's of course limited to how many data streams your router/access point can handle and the type of devices you're connecting to it and how many channels each device uses. Say you got a 3x3 MIMO router, you could have a 2x2 MIMO laptop and a single channel smartphone and they'd each get a dedicated data stream that wouldn't be shared between the two devices.
We'll see how 802.11ac works out, as it's as yet to be tested in real world scenarios.