it's common sense that aiming something in the direction you want it to go is
generally helpful whether you're shooting a hockey puck or visiting the
men's room but what about wi-fi i mean those little antennas that stick up from
your home router just kind of blast the signal or it's in a 360 degree donut
shape which is fine but what if you could aim your wi-fi signal toward the
spots in your house where your gadgets actually are it turns out that this is a
real technique and it's called beam forming but does it really work as
advertised to answer we spoke with our friend and wi-fi expert joel crane and
we'd like to thank him for giving us a nice strong assist so beam forming can
be implemented in one of two ways one is
to stick a bunch of antennas inside an access point and because each tenant is
in a different physical spot they'll all produce slightly different coverage
patterns the idea here is to decide which antenna combinations hear a client
device like a phone most strongly whenever it's transmitting to the router
so the router tries different combinations until it finds the best one
then it can time the transmissions from each antenna so that they all converge
at the same time at the spot where it thinks the client is it's kind of like
throwing two rocks into a pond and seeing the the spot where the ripples
come together to form one larger ripple this is called chip based beam forming
and it was mainly pioneered by a company called ruckus but other manufacturers
tend to use a different kind of beamforming built into the 802.11 ac
standard called sounding based beamforming here the
router continually talks to the client asking how good the signal is in order
to decide how to time each broadcast from each antenna but whichever kind of
beam forming you use though you do get the benefits of better speed at long
range and better range overall up to ten
percent better actually which can make a difference if you're trying to stream a
video far from your router for example well that sounds great right but here's
the issue when the ieee finalized the wireless ac standard it made sounding
based beam forming optional and when part of a standard is
merely optional it's like an optional workplace function nobody shows up so
even if you buy an ac router that says it supports beamforming odds are your
phones and other gadgets you have lying about do not and there are even plenty of
higher end client devices that lack beam forming support making matters worse
it's often very difficult to tell whether a client device does support it
from just looking at a spec sheet the best way to tell is to use a packet
capture program such as wireshark which will give you technical information on
the connection including whether a connected device supports beamforming of
course this requires you to actually have the gadget on hand before you buy
it but there is a database of wireshark readouts for a fair number of current
client devices which we've linked down below in the video description along
with instructions on exactly what to look for and even if you jump through
all these hoops to get both a router and a client device that supports
beamforming remember that beamforming is
one way so you don't get the same advantages when the client is
transmitting back to the router so don't
expect it to improve your upload speeds at the end of the day i wouldn't call
beamforming snake oil but it also probably isn't worth going on a perilous
quest to make it part of your wi-fi setup
so thanks to drop in the thx panda wireless headphones for sponsoring this
video they claim it's the world's most distortion free wireless headphone these
are closed headphones so all that high quality is nicely contained and they
benefit from community center design they use thx aaa amplifier technology
and ldac plus qualcomm qc5125 technology
they offer 30 hours of wireless life dual microphones bluetooth connectivity
and they're compatible with all sorts of digital assistants they come with a detachable gaming mic and the whole
thing weighs just 375 grams pre-order today at the link below so thanks for
watching guys if you like this video like it subscribe and be sure to hit us
up in the comments section with your ideas for topics that we should cover in
the future