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802.11ac 'Gigabit Wi-Fi' Starts To Show Potential, Limits
alphadogg writes "Vendor tests and very early 802.11ac customers provide a reality check on 'gigabit Wi-Fi' but also confirm much of its promise. Vendors have been testing their 11ac products for months, yielding data that show how 11ac performs and what variables can affect performance. Some of the tests are under ideal laboratory-style conditions; others involve actual or simulated production networks. Among the results: consistent 400M to 800Mbps throughput for 11ac clients in best-case situations, higher throughput as range increases compared to 11n, more clients serviced by each access point, and a boost in performance for existing 11n clients."
Actually it isn't. By far! 1. On a gigabit wired network you get 1Gbit of transfer speed. There is a very small percentage lost to coding but you get well over 100MB/s (up to about 120MB/s) trough a Gbit connection. If you get slower speeds and don't know why, than start searching for the bottleneck! 2. The 400Mbit to 800MBit in a WLAN is the "wire speed". I've never seen transfer rates that are more than 70% of this. So, I expect to get maybe 56MB/s (which is already quite good) out of "GBit WLAN" while I get 120MB/s out of an Ethernet connection almost all the time. Still impressive how they even reach such speeds! That's engineering at it's best!
2.4GHz is far too crowded. Switch to 5GHz and you should see an improvement, particularly if you're in the same room as the AP.
Conclusion: your house is made of crappy materials.