WEBVTT

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it's common sense that aiming something in the direction you want it to go is

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generally helpful whether you're shooting a hockey puck or visiting the

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men's room but what about wi-fi i mean those little antennas that stick up from

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your home router just kind of blast the signal or it's in a 360 degree donut

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shape which is fine but what if you could aim your wi-fi signal toward the

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spots in your house where your gadgets actually are it turns out that this is a

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real technique and it's called beam forming but does it really work as

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advertised to answer we spoke with our friend and wi-fi expert joel crane and

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we'd like to thank him for giving us a nice strong assist so beam forming can

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be implemented in one of two ways one is

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to stick a bunch of antennas inside an access point and because each tenant is

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in a different physical spot they'll all produce slightly different coverage

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patterns the idea here is to decide which antenna combinations hear a client

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device like a phone most strongly whenever it's transmitting to the router

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so the router tries different combinations until it finds the best one

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then it can time the transmissions from each antenna so that they all converge

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at the same time at the spot where it thinks the client is it's kind of like

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throwing two rocks into a pond and seeing the the spot where the ripples

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come together to form one larger ripple this is called chip based beam forming

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and it was mainly pioneered by a company called ruckus but other manufacturers

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tend to use a different kind of beamforming built into the 802.11 ac

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standard called sounding based beamforming here the

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router continually talks to the client asking how good the signal is in order

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to decide how to time each broadcast from each antenna but whichever kind of

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beam forming you use though you do get the benefits of better speed at long

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range and better range overall up to ten

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percent better actually which can make a difference if you're trying to stream a

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video far from your router for example well that sounds great right but here's

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the issue when the ieee finalized the wireless ac standard it made sounding

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based beam forming optional and when part of a standard is

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merely optional it's like an optional workplace function nobody shows up so

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even if you buy an ac router that says it supports beamforming odds are your

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phones and other gadgets you have lying about do not and there are even plenty of

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higher end client devices that lack beam forming support making matters worse

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it's often very difficult to tell whether a client device does support it

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from just looking at a spec sheet the best way to tell is to use a packet

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capture program such as wireshark which will give you technical information on

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the connection including whether a connected device supports beamforming of

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course this requires you to actually have the gadget on hand before you buy

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it but there is a database of wireshark readouts for a fair number of current

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client devices which we've linked down below in the video description along

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with instructions on exactly what to look for and even if you jump through

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all these hoops to get both a router and a client device that supports

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beamforming remember that beamforming is

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one way so you don't get the same advantages when the client is

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transmitting back to the router so don't

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expect it to improve your upload speeds at the end of the day i wouldn't call

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beamforming snake oil but it also probably isn't worth going on a perilous

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quest to make it part of your wi-fi setup

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so thanks to drop in the thx panda wireless headphones for sponsoring this

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video they claim it's the world's most distortion free wireless headphone these

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are closed headphones so all that high quality is nicely contained and they

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benefit from community center design they use thx aaa amplifier technology

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and ldac plus qualcomm qc5125 technology

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they offer 30 hours of wireless life dual microphones bluetooth connectivity

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and they're compatible with all sorts of digital assistants they come with a detachable gaming mic and the whole

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thing weighs just 375 grams pre-order today at the link below so thanks for

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watching guys if you like this video like it subscribe and be sure to hit us

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up in the comments section with your ideas for topics that we should cover in

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the future