802.eleventy what? Why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
I dropped out ouf the 802.11 business a few years ago but it seems I am still relevant, after all the article is about 802.11ac, not something about 802.11ax.
On the technical side I agree with most of what the author says, but it is only a part of the larger picture.<p>-First I did my own tests of 802.11ac in 2014 and the manufacturers were correct in their claims at that time. You have to understand that the best speed is when you are in ideal radio conditions and simply you are never in ideal conditions and most of the time you are even far from the ideal case.<p>- Second, 802.11 sucks but not about raw speed, the MAC layer of most chip implementations is often ultra simplified and the outcome is that it is difficult to be authentified. This is strange as the Wi-Fi chip most often is a little computer and the MAC is implemented in software.<p>- Third, there are unreasonable economic expectations by users as well as the article's author: Wait you want gigabit speeds, ultra-reliability in challenging radio conditions, and that at a tenth of the cost of a 3G mobile radio?<p>- Fourth: Your phone has more hard time to cope with that throughput, than the Wi-Fi chip has. Android and Linux in general have many internal buffers because there are layers in charge of different features. The usable throughput is the raw radio throughput divided by the number of buffers. There are research OSes which use pointers instead of buffers, but Linux and Windows use buffers.