Gadgetory

so you're shopping for a wireless router and they all seem to be more or less the same you're getting kind of bored and just gonna grab the one with the prettiest box of the whoa look at that Wireless 3200 are you freaking kidding over three gigabit Wi-Fi speed with tri-band technology time to throw it all your wired devices that are limited to will see one gigabit connections right actually no and I'll explain why but first let's get our terminology straight a wireless router is a bit of a misnomer but the term is so universally used that we're kind of stuck with it inside that box is actually three discrete components each of which can usually be turned off if you want to use a standalone appliance for that functionality instead so the first one is a router the traffic controller between the whole network all of your devices are connected to and all the other networks out there on the internet number two is a network switch the traffic controller between all of your devices and number three is a wireless access point or ap a radio with antennas that are sort of like a mini cell tower in your house that communicates with all your wireless standard compliant devices over the approved frequencies usually in the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz ranges all right so with that out of the way the important piece of the puzzle for this discussion is the access point how can it use the same wireless AC standard that we've already had for a couple of years and achieves so much more than the 1900 megabit max that we've seen advertised on dual band wireless ApS up until now well a big part of the problem actually lies in the marketing for these devices a dual band AC 1980 never actually achieves a 1900 megabit link speed to anything literally never that's an aggregated value for both the wireless AC 1300 megabit 5 gigahertz connection and the wireless and 600 megabit 2.4 gigahertz connection when they're being used concurrently but an individual client like your phone or computer would not be designed to utilize the two at the same time so what would be the point of tri-band or even duel them for that matter if true max connection speeds are still stuck at 1,300 megabit think of it like adding more lanes to the highway rather than increasing the speed limit more bands or radios means smoother operation with a greater number of connected devices because Wi-Fi is a polite communication protocol every other device in a given frequency has to wait it's turn while another one is talking so if you move some of your devices onto one frequency and others onto a completely separate non overlapping frequency you're dramatically improving the overall amount of data you can throw through the air more bands also helps address overall Wi-Fi slowdowns that occur when a legacy or slower client connects to the network using band steering technology and to separate 5 gigahertz radios each supporting three spatial streams the AP can sort the device is connected to it according to their capability with all the slow clients on one radio or going being scrubland on that radio by themselves and the faster ones on another improving performance for your shiny new gadgets sounds cool Linus but if adding more bands or discrete radios doesn't increase point-to-point connection speed then how can we ever replace our wires well the way it's been done up until now has been to utilize more and more of the available wireless spectrum per radio by transmitting and receiving on more frequencies concurrently like a wireless 802.11 AC compliant device must support at least two antennas operating together for example but there are some issues with that number one is that more spatial streams increases power consumption and heat output which is a big deal on the client side where you might have a phone or a laptop and if your clients don't support the faster link speed then you'll get no benefit anyway and another is that with the limited number of five gigahertz frequencies or channels available creating new link speed standards that can only be achieved by sprawling across more and more of the available spectrum will result in interference from the overlapping networks of your neighbors very soon just like we already have with 2.4 gigahertz by speaking of neighbors our friendly neighbors over at lynda.com are the sponsor of today's episode lynda.com is a great online resource for learning you can pick up a new skill for a hobby like photography or you can pick up new skills for a profession like photography or video editing in fact we've got a couple of people working here at Lynas Media Group that have got some of their online education from lynda.com their plans are extremely reasonable they offer a 10 day free trial so you can try it out before you commit and their courses are updated constantly with great content from industry experts so head over to lynda.com slash tech wiki to try out the free trial and to potentially sign up just like actually a lot 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