5 ms·

Ugh, what's the use of faster WiFi if the outbound internet connection is so slow. I think we need to focus more on faster broadband.

• nly 13y ago
  And robustness and range
• mikhailt 13y ago
  It's not like they're aren't working on faster broadband (like Google and its project to expand to 10GBps fiber). There are more than one project at any given moment any way, it's not as if the whole country is just working together on one thing at a time here. The problem with faster broadband isn't technical, it's politics and greed as usual in US. It's very easy to lay out fiber (I'm oversimplifying for the argument here but it is once we put the money to it) to 95% of the homes in US. However, the big companies like Verizon, AT&T, etc wouldn't do this unless there's a huge benefit for them involved. It's much easier for the government to handle this as a utility, rather than an information service. For this article, the problem was technical as the router can't push the data out at maximum speed to multiple devices at the same time and MU-MIMO in this article is a solution for this. How about the local network traffic? Even for a single user, having multiple devices reduces the maximum bandwidth the router can push out at any given time. MU-MIMO will help the efficiency of utilizing the maximum potential bandwidth that multiple devices can use at the same time. In my apartment, 3+ people would want to access the Internet at the fastest speed possible and MU-MIMO will make that possible once we all have the compatible chipsets and routers. With faster Internet speeds, you still need MU-MIMO because you'd like each device to use that speed at the same time. Otherwise, only one device at a time would be able to use your speed and it'd be a waste.