The world's first 802.11ac router, Buffalo's AirStation WZR-D1800H, being tested at CNET Labs.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)
Now that you can actually buy the first wireless networking products that use 802.11ac,Buffalo's router and media bridge, it's time you learned about the this new wireless standard. While the "ac" designation definitely does not mean "air conditioning," I can say for sure that 802.11ac is cool.
And by cool, I mean fast. That's the biggest difference about 802.11ac compared with previous wireless standards. But first let's see how similar it is.
802.11ac supplements 802.11n
Netgear's first 802.11ac router, the WiFi 6300, is set to be available for purchase this month.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)
802.11ac (aka 5G Wi-Fi) is the next step after 802.11n (aka N or Wireless-N, which is currently is the most popular Wi-Fi standard). It's backward-compatible with N, meaning that a 5G Wi-Fi router will support N clients and 5G Wi-Fi clients will also be able to connect to an N router. Wireless-N, in turn, is backward compatible with the rest of the wireless standards, including 802.11g, 802.11b, and 802.11a.
That means you can replace a router at home right now with a 5G Wi-Fi router and existing wireless devices, such as your laptop, iPad, iPhone, and so on, no matter how old, and they will still connect to your network the way they have always worked. To have the devices to work at the speed of 5G Wi-Fi, however, both the clients and the router need to support 5G Wi-Fi.
Clients like desktop and laptop computers will be able to upgrade to 5G Wi-Fi via add-in PCIe cards, Mini-PCI cards, or USB adapters. Later this year, mobile devices and computers with built-in 5G Wi-Fi support will be available.
Similar to Wireless-N, 802.11ac, for now, comes in three tiers, based on the number of streams. The more streams, the more bandwidth a device can handle. For example, Wireless-N has caps of 150Mbps with single-stream, 300Mbps with dual-stream, and 450Mbps with three-stream. 5G Wi-Fi connections are set to be about three times faster, starting with 450Mbps in single-stream, 900Mbps (dual-stream) and 1.3Gbps (three-stream). So technically, 5G Wi-Fi is the first wireless standard that breaks the gigabit barrier.
However, also similar to Wireless-N, via my preliminary testing with the Buffalo's AirStation WZR-D1800H wireless router (the review of which will be posted soon), the actual real-world speeds of 5G Wi-Fi vary depending on the environment and distance. Even in the optimal settings, they will be much lower than the ceiling speed. Still, in my trials, they have been consistently much faster than N.
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