Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
Great Articles. Jotting down some notes as I am reading it.<p>&gt;Greatly complicating a decision is that Wi-Fi 6E is just around the corner (early devices expected late 2020) that will require (yet again) new hardware -- existing Wi-Fi 6 devices will not support Wi-Fi 6E.<p>We <i>could</i> technically have WiFi 6 devices working with WiFI 6E as long as they were designed as such. I recall one of the ASUS engineers said their router would work, the problem is compliance and passing FCC certification and if Upgrade were <i>allowed</i>. Yes may be practically we need to buy new hardware. ( Profits )<p>And I could rant about WiFi 6&#x2F; 802.11ax for hours. Basically either buy a decent WiFi 5 or wait for 6E in hope they fix their mess.<p>MacBook Pro - As far as I know All 2016+ MacBook Pros has 802.11ac 3x3 WiFi by default. Giving you a &quot;marketing&quot; speed of 1300Mbps. Older Generation MacBook Pros has 3x3 for 15&quot;, 2x2 for MacBook Pro 13&quot;. All non-pros MacBook has always had 2x2 WiFi.<p>The reason is simply because only Broadcom make WiFI Client chipset that support 3x3. May be at the request of Apple. And the notebook market is basically an Intel only game. You get incentives and bundle pricing from Intel CPU for using Intel WiFi. And Intel doesn&#x27;t make 3x3 WiFi ( Or they did but only in <i>Centrino</i> era... ) . Not in 802.11ac and likely not in 802.11ax.<p>Since demand for 3x3 802.11ac continues to be a niche, PC vendors fail to market better WiFi speed as added value. And Intel doesn&#x27;t want to do a custom WiFi controller just for ~5M unit of MacBook Pro annually. And why innovate when there is no competition? Intel has 90%+ of Notebook PC market shares anyway.<p>In case anyone is wondering, there is an Broadcom 3x3 WiFi 6E client chipset announced last year. Hopefully you will see this in the next MacBook Pro Upgrade.<p>One reason people may have heard about the rumours of Broadcom selling their client WiFi business late last year. Their WiFi PC market is limited by Intel&#x27;s domination, Smartphone market is a similar situation with Qualcomm. And Broadcom&#x27;s Client WiFi business is primarily an Apple business. For nearly 4 years I have been anticipating Apple doing WiFi on their own before doing 4G&#x2F;5G Modem. Considering they use more WiFi unit than Intel&#x27;s current annual WiFi shipment. But so far only ultra low power chip W3 is being used in Apple Watch.<p>Samsung S20 is also an 2x2 Devices. May be worth an update in the WiFi 6 table.<p>&gt;The AC#### naming ......<p>Those naming are confusing, but one way to look at it is the number represent the theoretical maximum <i>capacity</i> of the WiFi network. Those were never intended to be speed. But of course marketing is working is way. So <i>hypothetically</i> speaking a higher speed router gets you faster speed when you have multiple client.<p>Nice! Turns out all of my 802,11ax Rant is included in the its own Section.<p>&gt;(1) 802.11ax is not even expected to be made an official IEEE standard until &quot;Sep 2020&quot; (source),<p>It should be noted the date is <i>prediction</i>. And that date has been moving up a quarter for every meeting since 2018. Draft 3.0 was suppose to be the last Draft, then Draft 5.0 and now Draft 6.0......<p>&gt; 160Mhz<p>It should be noted none of the current Mobile Devices ( Or basically Non Intel Wifi 6 devices irrespective of their form factor ) supports 160Mhz ( 160Mhz &#x2F; 80+80 ). Both Samsung and Apple are on 80Mhz only. This will likely change with WiFi 6E.<p>&gt;Not all wifi clients are DFS capable!<p>Wow. I was always under the assumption DFS is a router problem. This sucks.<p>Such a great site that explains so much what is wrong about WiFi and its industry as a whole. And how it seems no cares about the user experience. There are increasing amount of people who just want to use a simple and working 4G&#x2F;5G connection than their WiFi.<p>This is such a great resource I wish I could pay the authors some money as gratitude. It also reminds me of the Internet in the 90s where people spend their time, heart and soul into making something. It is not for SEO, or Ads Revenue. Simply wrote out of passion. ( or may be anger )<p>Thank You.