I can guarantee you that whatever Wi-Fi speed you're getting at home is slower than what
it says on your router's box, even if you're sitting right next to the antennas.
But why? And how can the router companies get away with putting these speeds on their marketing
if it doesn't reflect reality? It's like the feeling you get when you compare the burger in the picture to the one you actually
get. Well, those speeds on your router are theoretically possible.
In other words, what you'd be getting under optimal conditions.
But the bad news is those optimal conditions don't really exist.
One big reason why is interference. This can come from many sources, other Wi-Fi networks, wireless controllers, drones, and
even microwave ovens, among other things. These can all mess with your signal.
But what if you live in the middle of nowhere? You have no gadgets in your house besides a router and a laptop, and you only ever use
a toaster oven. You'll still be fighting against obstructions like walls and furniture, and even if you have
a clear line of sight between you and the router, you still have to think about signal
attenuation. Just as a radio station gets more static-y, the farther away you drive from it, the radio
waves that make up Wi-Fi signals invariably get weaker over distance.
This is especially true with higher frequency signals on the 5 and 6GHz Wi-Fi bands.
The higher the frequency, the more data they can carry and the faster they'll be, but
the laws of physics also dictate that they'll be shorter range.
Having more power to boost the signal often isn't an option, as there are legal limits
on how much power a wireless router can put out in order to stop it from interfering with
other electronics. This means if you get too far away, or there's just too much interference to where the router
and client can't reliably hear each other, they have to negotiate a slower speed, as
sending less data over a certain frequency is a good way to stabilize the connection.
So it might end up working just fine, but you won't see anything close to the speed
on the box. But did you know that even if you could reach those unicorn-like optimal conditions, like
in our country house with just a laptop right beside the router, that number on the box
is still probably exaggerated.
Like grossly exaggerated. Even under the best conditions possible, you'll still need to make sure your devices support
the same revision of Wi-Fi as the router, and have the same number of spatial streams
to take advantage of the full bandwidth. The vast majority of client devices, phones, laptops, etc., don't support more than two
spatial streams. So even if your router supports more, that speed on your box won't reflect what you
actually get on one device. But it can help in terms of performance when multiple devices are doing something bandwidth-heavy,
like streaming video. But this Wi-Fi 6 router is a great example of something even more egregious.
It promises you 1800 megabits per second of speed.
Wow! In all likelihood, that's way faster than your home internet connection.
But upon closer inspection, that number is derived from adding the 5 GHz and the 2.4
GHz speeds together. And Wi-Fi 6 just doesn't work that way.
You have to pick one band or the other, so while the 1800 is technically correct in
that it's the right theoretical total bandwidth, it's very misleading in terms of what people
think of when they hear speed.
And we also have to say a quick word about channel width.
If we're talking about Wi-Fi 6, you can have channels up to 160 MHz wide, meaning lots
of space to move data. But not only are some devices unable to receive a 160 MHz signal, you open yourself up to
a lot more potential interference and signal attenuation, meaning many folks have found
160 MHz channels to be fairly unreliable.
And although Wi-Fi 7 is on its way soon, which will support broadcasting on multiple
bands at once and better performance with wide channels, this doesn't mean we should
let manufacturers off the hook for their borderline dishonest claims about their products or expect
that they'll label their wares in a more realistic way going forward.
But of course, we're not trying to say it's as egregious as something like the Hawaii chair.
That was crazy. So thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit
us up in the comments section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.