Gadgetory

it seems like the onward march of wireless technology cannot be stopped I mean we keep flinging more and more stuff through the airwaves at such a rate that it's gotten to the point where wireless routers and adapters lose their value the same way as a new car being driven off the lot but even so the latest device is beginning to hit the market feature a number of bells and whistles that could make the long term solutions for even the heaviest users I'm talking of course about wireless AC wave 2 well wait a second Linus didn't wireless AC just come out not that long ago yes it did and wave 1 gear isn't bad it brought a number of improvements over older standards like 802.11 n and G like doing away with 2.4 gigahertz and dramatically improving speeds but they were stuck in the past in one very crucial way a wave one router or access point can only communicate with one device at a time well hold on a second again Linus my old router at home has like 12 things connected to it at a time and they all work so how can what you're saying be true well routers and access points prior to wave to have to communicate with all of those devices sequentially assuming that it's only operating on one band you can find out more about that in our video on try band Wi-Fi here this can lead to Network slowdowns and possibly wasted bandwidth you see wave 1 devices support up to 3 streams and what this essentially means is that you have three antennas coming off the router and each one has a certain bandwidth that is 433 megabits per second if your client device has three streams let's say a desktop rig with a PCI Express Wi-Fi adapter with three antennas on it then you could actually triple that speed and get up to 1300 megabits per second but most people's AC devices are more likely to be consumer electronics like smart phones which typically only support one stream and because wave 1 routers can only connect to them sequentially that means a full two-thirds of your router's bandwidth could be left unused at any given moment what wave2 does instead is use a new technology called mu-mimo and mu-mimo this allows the router to connect to multiple cows I mean devices all at once so if you have a four stream router and say to stream laptop a one stream phone and a one stream tablet you can use all of your routers bandwidth meaning fewer slowdowns which is especially important for public Wi-Fi hotspots with a ton of devices connected at once and yeah that's right I said for stream router which is also a new wave to feature if you connect to a four stream client you can actually have a maximum theoretical speed of nearly 3.5 gigabits per second more than two and a half times faster than wave one since wave 2 can now leverage up to 160 megahertz wide channels so that's double the bandwidth of wave 1 effectively meaning more room for your data to flow but hold on a second before you rush out and buy a shiny new wave 2 router there are a few limitations and caveats both your router and your device have to support wave 2 to take advantage of the faster speeds and mu-mimo older devices will still work as wave 2 is backwards compatible not just with AC wave 1 but also wireless n but you won't see the benefits in action and keep in mind too that while those wicked fast speeds with a hundred and sixty megahertz wide data superhighways might sound great for wireless 4k video streaming which they could do the practical limits of the technology will actually be lower in crowded areas with many access points and clients like in condominiums where users of 2.4 gigahertz are already experiencing what it's like to have many access points competing for airtime where each of them takes up a full third of the available spectrum which setting your AP to 160 megahertz would do on 5 gigahertz I mean it wouldn't be your problem I guess but your neighbor wouldn't like it very much and speaking of things that your neighbor might like mass drop head over to draw dots slash Linus tech tips and check out the latest awesome stuff going on over there they've got all kinds of things available on mass drop like knives or you know monitors keyboards drones yes the feature deal right now is a 3d our iris plus aerial surveyor drone it offers 16 to 22 minutes of flight time a payload capacity of 400 grams it's got a GoPro compatible camera mount and it can stream live from a GoPro to a wireless monitor attached to the iris plus controller so wait a second why would I buy this on mass drop it's like oh right lower prices so the way mass drop works is the more people commit to buy the lower the price goes and this one's lowest drop is $100 off retail $4.99 u.s. plus shipping but if you're not interested in a drone go check out mass drop anyway because they got all kinds of awesome stuff over there so thanks for watching guys if you liked the video hit that like button if you just liked it well hit the other button also check out our other channels we've got a great video we just released with like wirelessly controlled cars whipping around a track that was pretty sweet and leave a comment if you have suggestions for future videos subscribe follow oh and last but not least a big THANK YOU to Joel from Metta geek for helping us out with this episode of fast as possible those guys over there really know their Wi-Fi and yes you can check them out over at side well Google Metta geek I don't remember their site off the top of my head but yeah