AC vs N/1x1 vs 2x2

[zasbill1988]

Excuse me for my slight ignorance. I have a duel band router running a 150mbps cable connection. I have a laptop using a realtek rtl8188ee wireless card. I'm wanting to replace it with an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3168 802.11 ac 1x1 WiFi + BT 4.2 Combo (non-vPro). I have double checked and have confirmed that the Intel replacement is completely compatible with my system. As far as I understand, 1x1 means that it uses 1 antenna. If that is the case, and I install the new Intel card using the 1 antenna that my laptop has, will I still get all the benefits of an AC card? Meaning, will I still be able to connect to both the 2.4 and 5ghz signals? I had someone mentioning that without a 2nd antenna, I would not receive the full benefits of an AC adapter.

 

[vmfantom]

Specifically, 1x1:1 means one transmitting antenna and one receiving antenna for one spatial stream. The Intel card supports a link rate of 433.3 Mbps on 5 GHz and 150 Mbps on 2.4 GHz. Were it 2x2:2, it would support 866.7 and 300 Mbps respectively. A single device would not be able to connect to both 2.4 and 5 GHz simultaneously, and so your card would be either/or. It's not clear what that person meant about the "full benefits," since technically, 8 streams at 1024-QAM would be the maximum for 5 GHz 802.11ac. Single stream 802.11ac is pretty uncommon, but the link rate is nevertheless higher than 802.11n for the same stream count.