4 ms·

AC only supports 5gz, which has significantly worse range and is impacted much more by walls or other solid objects. But if there aren't a problem it's generall

AC only supports 5gz, which has significantly worse range and is impacted much more by walls or other solid objects. But if there aren't a problem it's generally better

mrb 8y ago
"AC only supports 5gz." That's not an accurate statement. "802.11ac" denotes a set of features, and many of them apply to and benefit the 2.4 GHz band. For example 256QAM encoding boosts the max data rate by 20 or 33% on this band for, respectively, 20 and 40 MHz channels.
- chipperyman573 8y ago
  Interesting. How come all the consumer routers I've used have always required 5ghz to use AC capabilities? Are the rest of the ac features enterprisey? Or have I just not interacted with enough routers to see these?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- oasisbob 8y ago
  Isn't 256QAM on 2.4GHz a proprietary feature? https://www.cwnp.com/forums/posts?postNum=307358 https://www.cwnp.com/forums/posts?postNum=307358 I always heard that 802.11ac was 5GHz only, and that on dual-band, stations would stick with 802.11n for 2.4GHz
- DesertBattery 8y ago
  > 802.11ac is a 5-GHz-only technology https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/wireless/aironet-3600-series/white-paper-c11-713103.pdf https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/wirele...
derefr 8y ago
Those limitations are a good thing: they reduce interference from neighbouring apartments/offices, and even interference between overlapping cells of a mesh network or a base station and its extenders. In practice, this means that the extenders can extend longer, so something like a convention center or work-sharing space can use approximately the same number of base stations it did before. The only problem is that your phone might not be able to talk to your router through your bathroom wall any more. But that capability was always a sign of wi-fi being too noisy—imagine a light that can manage to penetrate a bathroom wall, and tell me you don’t think it’s maybe a bit too powerful for consumer use ;)
- Nullabillity 8y ago
  > Those limitations are a good thing: they reduce interference from neighbouring apartments/offices Sometimes. 5GHz is great for apartments (where you have lots of noise and a tiny area) and offices (where you have lots of noise and a large budget), but for a villa 2.4GHz usually hits the sweet spot between noise and coverage.
- SEMW 8y ago
  > imagine a light that can manage to penetrate a bathroom wall, and tell me you don’t think it’s maybe a bit too powerful for consumer use ;) Visible light has a wavelength of a few hundred nanometers; wifi is around 10 centimeters. Material penetrability varies enormously between different wavelengths (and between materials). Harm to humans also various enormously, and in a way very different from penetrability (for example, some wavelengths of UVC are very harmful to human skin but can be almost completely blocked by a thin sheet of clear glass). Equating penetrability with either 'power' or harmfulness is not a useful intuition. (incidentally, an incandescent light bulb emits on a blackbody spectrum, so some very small proportion of the energy it uses will be emitted at e.g. radio wave frequencies, which will certainly penetrate the bathroom wall)

AC only supports 5gz, which has significantly worse range and is impacted much more by walls or other solid objects. But if there aren't a problem it's generally better

mrb 8y ago

"AC only supports 5gz." That's not an accurate statement. "802.11ac" denotes a set of features, and many of them apply to and benefit the 2.4 GHz band. For example 256QAM encoding boosts the max data rate by 20 or 33% on this band for, respectively, 20 and 40 MHz channels.

chipperyman573 8y ago
Interesting. How come all the consumer routers I've used have always required 5ghz to use AC capabilities? Are the rest of the ac features enterprisey? Or have I just not interacted with enough routers to see these?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
oasisbob 8y ago
Isn't 256QAM on 2.4GHz a proprietary feature? https://www.cwnp.com/forums/posts?postNum=307358 https://www.cwnp.com/forums/posts?postNum=307358 I always heard that 802.11ac was 5GHz only, and that on dual-band, stations would stick with 802.11n for 2.4GHz
DesertBattery 8y ago
> 802.11ac is a 5-GHz-only technology https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/wireless/aironet-3600-series/white-paper-c11-713103.pdf https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/wirele...

derefr 8y ago

Those limitations are a good thing: they reduce interference from neighbouring apartments/offices, and even interference between overlapping cells of a mesh network or a base station and its extenders. In practice, this means that the extenders can extend longer, so something like a convention center or work-sharing space can use approximately the same number of base stations it did before. The only problem is that your phone might not be able to talk to your router through your bathroom wall any more. But that capability was always a sign of wi-fi being too noisy—imagine a light that can manage to penetrate a bathroom wall, and tell me you don’t think it’s maybe a bit too powerful for consumer use ;)

Nullabillity 8y ago
> Those limitations are a good thing: they reduce interference from neighbouring apartments/offices Sometimes. 5GHz is great for apartments (where you have lots of noise and a tiny area) and offices (where you have lots of noise and a large budget), but for a villa 2.4GHz usually hits the sweet spot between noise and coverage.
SEMW 8y ago
> imagine a light that can manage to penetrate a bathroom wall, and tell me you don’t think it’s maybe a bit too powerful for consumer use ;) Visible light has a wavelength of a few hundred nanometers; wifi is around 10 centimeters. Material penetrability varies enormously between different wavelengths (and between materials). Harm to humans also various enormously, and in a way very different from penetrability (for example, some wavelengths of UVC are very harmful to human skin but can be almost completely blocked by a thin sheet of clear glass). Equating penetrability with either 'power' or harmfulness is not a useful intuition. (incidentally, an incandescent light bulb emits on a blackbody spectrum, so some very small proportion of the energy it uses will be emitted at e.g. radio wave frequencies, which will certainly penetrate the bathroom wall)