Bandwidth. It’s a key element driving user satisfaction on any wireless network. Nothing frustrates clients and employees alike more than a slow connection and in today’s mobility-driven technology environment, speed is everything.
Ensuring your guest wireless network isn’t powered by snails is up to you, which is where 802.11ac becomes very useful. A wireless standard approved in January 2014, 802.11ac is the evolution of the commonly adopted 802.11n and the answer to sluggish bandwidth issues within your guest network.
Five Ways 802.11ac Can Make Your Network Great
1. Better Data Transfer Speeds…Way Better
Wireless speeds depend on a variety of factors. An increased channel bandwidth is one of these, and the 802.11ac standard has an increased channel width of 80MHz, with the potential for an even further increase to 160MHz as the second generation of 802.11ac (wave 2) devices become more prevalent. These means that multi-gigabit speeds are now achievable. Couple this fact with the allowance of up to eight simultaneous spatial streams (a step up from the previous standard’s four), and a significant rate of transfer is possible.
2. Less Interference and More Spectrum
Because 802.11ac operates exclusively in the 5GHz band, wider channel enabling is possible with less interference. While 802.11n operates in the 2.4GHz band, which only has 83.hMHz and three channels, the 5GHZ band offers 480MHz with twenty-four channels.
3. Range is No Longer a Problem
While higher frequencies increase the theoretical speed possible, they lose out in the range department to lower frequencies, which offer the advantage of greater range. The 802.11ac standard solves this issue by offering beamforming. While its predecessor also offered beamforming as a feature, it’s this standard that achieves success in this regard.
Beamforming essentially allows the ability to focus a signal beam and target a specific device, while eliminating wasted signal. By focusing signals towards a client, devices supporting beamforming are able to concentrate data transmission instead of radiating it outwards, and if the device receiving the data also supports beamforming, location data can be exchanged to determine the most optimal signal path.
4. Compatibility isn’t an Issue
The 802.11ac standard is designed to be backwards compatibility with clients still using the older 802.11n and 802.11a, and dual-band APs will support the 2.4GHz frequency with 802.11n.
5. The More, the Merrier
Continuing in its predecessor’s footsteps, 802.11ac supports single-user MIMO, where each wireless access point can use up to four spatial streams to talk to a client, but it also offers the advantage of multiple-user MIMO. This means that access points can divide up available spatial streams to talk to as many as four clients simultaneously, naturally improving the potential user density that the network can support.
Photo credit: Sergey Galyonkin via photopin cc
