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Due to the increased efficiency, the speed increase is supposed to be much higher. At CES they showed up to 11Gbits: https://www.zdnet.com/article/d-link-asus-t

Due to the increased efficiency, the speed increase is supposed to be much higher. At CES they showed up to 11Gbits: https://www.zdnet.com/article/d-link-asus-tout-802-11ax-wi-fi-routers-but-youll-have-to-wait-until-later-in-2018/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/d-link-asus-tout-802-11ax-wi-f...

zamadatix 8y ago
That's just the marketing, AC would have been 7 gbit/s if measured in the same ludicrous 8x8 160 MHz setup (though technically AC only specifies up to 4x4 it doesn't matter, clients are almost exclusively 2x2, even high end laptops). Even in a full greenfield ax deployment it'll be a rare sight to see your phy rate pop above 1 gbit/s half duplex as a client. Like the parent comment said the actual felt speed gains in a real world situation are going to be from OFDMA allowing concurrent use at slower speeds.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  I always took these numbers to be like a Switch's fabric speed. Not the speed an individual client would receive.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  MacBook Pros have had 3x3 for a while now (except for the non-touchbar 13” post-2016, which is really more of a MacBook Air internally anyway).
  - zamadatix 8y ago
    Yep, it's about the one client I ever see be 3x3. They use a specially customized version of the 2014 BCM943602 to do it. Don't think I've ever seen a 4x4 client pop into our logs that wasn't an AP to AP bridge but I know there are a handful of adapters made which support it. Interestingly Intel gave up on making 3x3 cards a couple of years ago but will sell you a 160 MHz 2x2 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
mrb 8y ago
Well this D-Link router shown at CES is "tri-band" (a misnomer, it should be called "tri-channel") so "11 Gbit/s" is just the sum of the maximum data rate achievable in 3 different channels (one channel in the 2.4 GHz band, plus two channels in the 5 GHz band), where each channels is as wide as possible (40 MHz at 2.4 GHz, and 160 MHz at 5 GHz), and where each channels uses 4 MIMO streams (ie. 4 antennas transmitting concurrently.) For comparison, the number I quoted in my parent post is just for 1 channel at 80 MHz with 1 MIMO stream. D-Link can claim "11 Gbit/s" because: - first channel at 2.4 GHz is 40 MHz wide (468 data subcarriers) where 802.11ax can operate at 286.8 Mbit/s, multiplied by 4 streams = 1147 Mbit/s - second channel at 5 GHz is 160 MHz wide (1960 data subcarriers) where 802.11ax can operate at 1201.0 Mbit/s, multiplied by 4 streams = 4804 Mbit/s - third channel also provides 4804 Mbit/s 1147 + 4804 + 4804 = 10755 Mbit/s which D-Link's marketing team rounds to "11 Gbit/s." It goes without saying that a typical client WiFi device (phone, laptop) will never reach 11 Gbit/s. For starters it will only use 1 of the 3 channels (4804 Mbit/s maximum) and most devices are 2×2 thus capable of 2 streams (2402 Mbit/s maximum.) Even if they are 3×3 you'd be lucky in real-world conditions to get about one and a half times or twice the bandwidth of one stream.

zamadatix 8y ago

That's just the marketing, AC would have been 7 gbit/s if measured in the same ludicrous 8x8 160 MHz setup (though technically AC only specifies up to 4x4 it doesn't matter, clients are almost exclusively 2x2, even high end laptops). Even in a full greenfield ax deployment it'll be a rare sight to see your phy rate pop above 1 gbit/s half duplex as a client. Like the parent comment said the actual felt speed gains in a real world situation are going to be from OFDMA allowing concurrent use at slower speeds.

cptskippy 8y ago
I always took these numbers to be like a Switch's fabric speed. Not the speed an individual client would receive.
rsynnott 8y ago
MacBook Pros have had 3x3 for a while now (except for the non-touchbar 13” post-2016, which is really more of a MacBook Air internally anyway).
- zamadatix 8y ago
  Yep, it's about the one client I ever see be 3x3. They use a specially customized version of the 2014 BCM943602 to do it. Don't think I've ever seen a 4x4 client pop into our logs that wasn't an AP to AP bridge but I know there are a handful of adapters made which support it. Interestingly Intel gave up on making 3x3 cards a couple of years ago but will sell you a 160 MHz 2x2 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

mrb 8y ago

Well this D-Link router shown at CES is "tri-band" (a misnomer, it should be called "tri-channel") so "11 Gbit/s" is just the sum of the maximum data rate achievable in 3 different channels (one channel in the 2.4 GHz band, plus two channels in the 5 GHz band), where each channels is as wide as possible (40 MHz at 2.4 GHz, and 160 MHz at 5 GHz), and where each channels uses 4 MIMO streams (ie. 4 antennas transmitting concurrently.) For comparison, the number I quoted in my parent post is just for 1 channel at 80 MHz with 1 MIMO stream. D-Link can claim "11 Gbit/s" because: - first channel at 2.4 GHz is 40 MHz wide (468 data subcarriers) where 802.11ax can operate at 286.8 Mbit/s, multiplied by 4 streams = 1147 Mbit/s - second channel at 5 GHz is 160 MHz wide (1960 data subcarriers) where 802.11ax can operate at 1201.0 Mbit/s, multiplied by 4 streams = 4804 Mbit/s - third channel also provides 4804 Mbit/s 1147 + 4804 + 4804 = 10755 Mbit/s which D-Link's marketing team rounds to "11 Gbit/s." It goes without saying that a typical client WiFi device (phone, laptop) will never reach 11 Gbit/s. For starters it will only use 1 of the 3 channels (4804 Mbit/s maximum) and most devices are 2×2 thus capable of 2 streams (2402 Mbit/s maximum.) Even if they are 3×3 you'd be lucky in real-world conditions to get about one and a half times or twice the bandwidth of one stream.