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 route
are just kind of blast the signal out where 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
antenna 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 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 beam forming built into the 802.11ac
standard called sounding based beam forming. 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 10% 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 beam forming,
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 beam forming.
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
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
beam forming, remember that beam forming 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 beam forming 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 for watching guys,
if you liked this video, like it, subscribe and be sure to hit us up in the comment section
with your ideas for topics that we should cover in the future.