Only if you have the whole channel available for that one device. Wi-Fi is a shared medium - devices at slow bitrates use the same amount of airtime that could

Only if you have the whole channel available for that one device. Wi-Fi is a shared medium - devices at slow bitrates use the same amount of airtime that could be used by a faster device to send much more data. So a) if you're in a dense wi-fi environment, every bit sent with this system takes away much more than 1 bit worth of time from faster devices, and b) assuming the array of sensors mentioned in the article is around a dozen or two devices, we're down into the sub-Mbps range per device. Still better than bluetooth, and very useful for the kinds of data that low-power sensors would send, but not the kind of performance you'd want for pushing media files or really high-detail sensor data. (Hence the performance benefits for large greenfield networks of dropping support for low bitrates - both preventing old clients from hogging the channel, and obviating the need to send control traffic at the slower bitrates.)