Gigabit Wireless. This is the phrase that pays when it comes to marketing 802.11ac, because finally the wireless providers have a technology able to compete against structured CAT5e or CAT6 wiring. Why would you hassle with the deployment and location restrictions of wired networking if you can get the same results from Wi-Fi? You wouldn’t...if the promise held true, that is.
We saw in Gigabit Ethernet: Dude, Where's My Bandwidth? that you can get 100 MB/s+ throughput on a gigabit network using 28 feet of cable the same as 50 feet. The same story showed us it's nearly impervious to environmental interference. So, unlike wireless, we’re not left thinking, "Well, it says 1000 Mb/s, but I'm really only getting 30 MB/s." Providing you don't have any bottlenecks, gigabit is gigabit, period. As we’ll see, 802.11ac is not gigabit-class wireless. That's marketing. But is it better than 802.11n? Oh, most definitely.
To understand why 802.11ac is superior, we need to delve into some of its key advances over the prior Wi-Fi technology.

Exclusive use of the 5.0 GHz band. 802.11n makes use of either 2.4 GHz or 5.0 GHz, but we know that the 2.4 GHz range is already congested. It works, but 2.4 GHz is unreliable, and the more we want to trust it with high-bandwidth data, such as streaming HD video, the more reliability becomes a factor. Simply put, 2.4 GHz is almost tapped out, at least with current-gen approaches. You can force it into providing more performance, through “bad neighbor” tactics like channel bonding, but this has counterbalancing negative effects for others in the wireless community. The 5.0 GHz range is largely pristine land for wireless drilling, if you will, and the IEEE forces behind the new wireless standard opted to open it up for its next-gen resources.
Wider channel bandwidth. The 802.11n standard allows for the combination of two 20 MHz channels into a single 40 MHz bonded channel. In the 2.4 GHz range, already having 40 MHz channels dropped the number of effective channel options to just three. With 5.0 GHz Wi-Fi, we have 23 possible 20 MHz channels. This yields 11 effective 40 MHz channels. And now, with 802.11ac, we’re starting with 80 MHz channels, of which there are five non-overlapping options. And yes, the 802.11ac spec does scale up to 160 MHz bonded channels, but there will only be two such channels available. We’ll suspend judgment on whether 160 MHz is a good thing when we start hearing reports of how such super-wide channels perform in residential areas, particularly in the company of competing HDTV sets and smartphones.
Mo’ MIMO. Multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) technology provides for the separation of a single data stream into more than one sub-stream able to travel along different radio paths. This separation and recombination of signals yields higher total data throughput in many circumstances. However, more sub-signals (properly called spatial streams), results in the need for more transmit (Tx) and receive (Rx) antennas. The 450 Mb/s rates advertised in the latest, highest-end 802.11n products are only possible with a 3x3:3 (three transmit, three receive, three stream) antenna array. While 802.11n provides for up to four spatial streams, 802.11ac can use up to eight.
MU-MIMO. Multiple-user MIMO can turn multiple users into spatially disparate, but wirelessly linked transmission resources. In other words, with multiple radio terminals in a given area, all can cooperate in order to improve each terminal’s performance. The singer-user MIMO found in 802.11n can only operate with the multiple antennas hard-wired into a single terminal. With MU-MIMO, 802.11ac access points will be able to process MIMO signals from multiple clients simultaneously, rather than having to hop quickly (and inefficiently) from one to the next. This should dramatically help with airtime fairness issues in highly-populated client environments.
Optional beamforming. In Why Your Wi-Fi Sucks and How It Can Be Helped, we spent considerable time delving into beamforming and the circumstances in which it can dramatically improve wireless throughput. At the time of that writing, there were no industry standard approaches to beamforming, leaving buyers to pick among a few vendors who chose to improve their 802.11n products with proprietary approaches to the technology.
- 802.11ac: The Beginning
- 802.11ac Advances
- Broadcom: Insider Comments
- Broadcom: Insider Comments, Continued
- Broadcom: Insider Comments, Continued
- Test Setup And Methodology
- AirLive N450R And Asus RT-AC66U
- Belkin AC1200 DB And Buffalo AC1300/N900
- Linksys EA6500/AC1750 And Netgear R6300
- Results: 2 GB Folder Copy
- Results: PerformanceTest 7, Same-Room
- Results: PerformanceTest 7, Across-House
- Results: PerformanceTest 7 Graphs
- Results: IxChariot, Same-Room, 5.0 GHz
- Results: IxChariot
- Results: IxChariot, Across-House, 2.4 GHz
- 802.11ac: A Substantial Step Up From 802.11n

I think this review proved that it is time to wait for 2nd generation wireless AC routers to appear before rushing to purchase.
Never again...
I'll give ac a year or two before I jump on it...
I have a dual-band router (Netgear N600). I also purchased a couple of dual-band client USB adapters Linksys AE2500 or something to that effect.
So the USB adapter works fine for a desktop, but having that crap sticking out the side of a laptop, netbook or tablet? Busted in 10 minutes. I hooked one up to my netbook and fried it within a couple of weeks because I'm a Netbook in bed guy. You wouldn't think it could get so hot from a USB port but it does.
So the reality is that you have all these devices that can't be upgraded to dual-band and enjoy very little if any benefit from the new-fangled dual-band router.
The other beef I have with routers is that they're terrible with the way they split up bandwidth between multiple devices. Instead of responsively reassigning bandwidth to the device that needs it, the router continues to reserve a major slice for a device that I'm not using.
If you live in an apartment building, it's actually rather rude to use the full 300Mbps capacity of the wireless N band, since you may well succeed in effectively shutting your neighbor down. There's so much happening in the 2.4GHz band nowadays, it's unreal. Your own cordless keyboards/mice/controllers etc can malfunction from being unable to get a packet in edgewise.
For these dual-band routers to be really useful, we need manufacturers of smartphones, tablets, laptops, netbook and such to build dual-band clients into them because adding the functionality with some sort of dongle just doesn't work.
I think this review proved that it is time to wait for 2nd generation wireless AC routers to appear before rushing to purchase.
Never again...
I'll give ac a year or two before I jump on it...
Exactly. The 'client' adapter they used if anyone didn't catch it was a Cisco/Linksys router-sized device. Not practical by any means. It'd be totally insane to make any product recommendations prior to real client adapters being available, or more accurately, embedded ones are available. I think a wireless salesman wrote this article.
They can't put lipstick on this pig.
No actually , If you transfer from hardrive to hardrive you probably get a max output of 45MB/s The asus is close to 35MB/s wich is almost maxing out ur drives power. Ofcourse if you have a good performance you can get upto 80MB/s or a little more Not counting SSD to SSD transfer rates- Also remember that you will be able to transfer 4k HD content with the same amount of data that 1080p took
Shibby save us with another awesome tomato release!
Probably so. However, on the graph it's written Mb(Megabits), not MB(Megabytes). Since tehnically 8b=1B, 35Mb/s=4.38MB/s and that's very slow. That's why I asked if the graph meant Mb/s or MB/s.
Most networks - in my experience - are some sort of hodgepodge of different devices. So ac speeds are only really relevant if the results also translate over to the other spaces.
1) Wired performance: All of these things sport wired gigabit connectivity, but as with wireless we all know that wired performance can have wired bottlenecks and problems of its own. I am sure they are all better than wireless or 100/t... but what kind of throughput are we talking about? Personally (and I know I am not alone on this), I like wireless for portable devices, but for something that never moves like a TV or a PC it is really not that much extra effort to run a line under carpet or through a vent.
-Specifically I am curious to know if any of these routers can run their ethernet in a gang mode so that I can have 2 gigabit lines to a server, and 2 lines to my PC (and 1 line to my wife's PC) so I can have enough throughput to offload all of my HDDs to a central location and have a truly silent PC without having to use a seperate switch or router. I do video editing, and obviously cannot afford 10GbE in the home, so this type of setup is needed to get the 150+MB/s throughput needed for real video editing (until consumer 5GbE or 10GbE becomes available... where is that tech anyways?). I am currently using a wireless G router, and then an old (and noisy) gigabit switch (using 5 ports on a 24 port switch lol), and to be able to consolidate both devices would be really nice.
2) High traffic performance: We all know that G and N suffer once you populate a network with a lot of devices, or have multiple networks congesting the same area. While I personally have very low traffic in my area (very low-tech neighbors), I know a ton of readers live in apartments, or have businesses with a ton of machines, and it would be nice for them to know how many devices you can have before having to worry about a serious performance fall-off. As most devices are still on N it would also be curious to see if these new routers can support more devices on N before seeing fall-off than traditional N devices.
3) Internet performance: I have 'decently fast' internet at my home, but that is still only ~25Mb/s. But when wireless G is at 54Mb/s it makes it rather hard to justify getting anything faster than G for your average home user that is simply using wireless on 1-3 devices for internet access, and there is very little file sharing going on. Are there any real-world tests to show some significant performance boost for such simple 'internet only' uses? Perhaps lower ping rates, or more consistent performance at that 25Mb/s level?
4) Power savings: I think more than anything that 11ac is going to show most of it's usefulness in power savings for future portable devices (and I think that ties in a lot with why they are marketing it as 5G to tie in with the cell network speak of 3G and 4G). I look at my friends phones that are only 1-2 years old, and they have to disable the wifi to get a full day's battery out of the phone because wifi's idle simply takes too much power. Compare that to new phones (or even higher quality old phones) which you can leave the wifi on all day and not have a significant battery issue. Even my 5 year old laptop gains an hour or more of battery life (a near 1/3 life boost) simply by turning off the wifi switch, so obviously the new radios in devices are getting much better at battery life without sacrificing much in the way of performance. Also cell providers like ATT and VZW have a lot of incentive to push 5G on phones and in houses to off-load cell traffic.
Anywho, I guess what I am curious about is if the actual network speed is what gains the battery performance, or if it is merely having a more modern radio which brings such gains. As mentioned already, I am running 11g both at work and at home, and so 'all things being equal' the battery impact of wireless appears to have more to do with how modern the device is rather than the speed of the wireless network. I understand the 'race to sleep' argument, but if your internet coming in is only ~5-30Mb/s then I relay wonder if the end device will be able to sleep much at all. Because no matter if your network is 54Mb/s or 1300Mb/s the slow drip of the internet connection is going to keep those radios awake the entire time the internet is up. So is the 5G battery improvement really going to be from the network speed? Or is it merely going to be a factor of having a smaller and more efficient radio package to begin with regardless of what network it hooks up to?
-Note: this is not the same thing as comparing 3G to 4G/LTE networks where the actual internet speed is faster allowing the device to gets it's job done faster and go to sleep faster. When on a network the internet speed is a relative constant (and almost always slower than 11g), and I am curious if changing the wireless from 11g to 11n/ac provides any battery gain on any given device for a set workload.
Anywho, Great article! My old wireless G router is starting to have troubles, and needs to be reset every 4-6 weeks, so I am really curious about getting either a high end 11n device, or a midrange 11ac device before the year is out. And if I can find one that can last the 8+ years that my current linksys G router did then all the better! We don't see a lot of wireless articles here on Toms, and it is something that is increasingly important as people put heavier workloads and take bigger machines off of wired connections.