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Jason

WiFI6 - Is The Juice Worth the Squeeze?

Updated: Jun 28, 2020

If you’re like me, you like your shiny new tech toys. I started to pay attention to wireless networking after my many dealings over the years with apartments and houses that were not conveniently wired. Trying to cheat the cable company by sharing internet with my roommates or cursing and sweating in a 95-degree attic, trying to drop Ethernet cable down a wall wasn't fun anymore. In the early days of retail WIFI, (Y2K) 802.11b was certainly newly convenient, but the 11 Mbps left something to be desired. Good for printing and lite web surfing, 802.11b was good start but significantly lacked the throughput of the 100BaseT wired technology of the day and the new 1000BaseT topology. Starting around 2003, 802.11g gave us a whopping 54 Mbps, half the speed of 100baseT. Although with half duplex as well as the overhead involved in wireless communication, you would be lucky to get 25 Mbps, but at least you could start streaming video at least. Then came 802.11n and the introduction of 40mhz channels. With a respectable 600Mpbs in a perfect setup, 802.11n started to get people's attention and by 2007, enterprises had started deploying it. Just when you thought things couldn't get any better, in 2014, 802.11ac was released with a theoretical max speed of...what? Almost 7Gbps! (7X faster than wired gigabit Ethernet) Here is where the problem began ladies and gentlemen. The problem is that the industry never produced network adapters capable of unlocking the full potential of that shiny, sexy, $300 router you just bought. Laptops and cell phones typically come with 2 antennas....if that. Granted there were a few adapters that I would put in the 802.11ac hall of fame capable of giving you about the best rate you can get, 1.3 Gpbs.










The Netgear AC1900 (left) was a clunky USB adapter with 3x4 MU-MIMO but probably the best USB NIC on the market for 802.11ac. It came with a nice base as to avoid it obnoxiously sticking out the side of your ultrabook! You can pick one up for about $70 on Amazon. My personal favorite, probably the only 4x4 802.11ac adapters on the market, was the PCIe Asus AC88 (right)...or as I call it "The God adapter". Still around $100 if you can find it online, this a PCI Express adapter that to be installed in a desktop PC. It comes with an external antenna which has a very short cable (probably intentional to reduce loss)...so it would barely reach the top of your case. Needless to say trying to reach the max 1.3Gpbs on 802.11ac isn't easily achievable with just your average network hardware, so seek out the best.





802.11ax (WiFI6) promises us better efficiency improving upon the limitations of the past, such as only 1 client being able to transmit at a time, but will we finally get to open her up on the autobahn and see what she can do? There are several adapters for sale now that spec out at 3000Mbps so that is a good sign. By focusing on efficiency, as opposed to raw throughput, we are now starting to break through the barrier that kept previous generations of wifi standards from exceeding wired speeds. So is it worth it? I think so and it's only going to get better folks so happy upgrading!

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