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

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whether you're shooting a hockey puck or visiting the men's room.

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But what about Wi-Fi? I mean, those little antennas that stick up from your home route

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are just kind of blast the signal out where it's in a 360 degree donut shape, which is fine.

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But what if you could aim your Wi-Fi signal toward the spots in your house where your gadgets

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actually are? It turns out that this is a real technique and it's called beam forming. But

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does it really work as advertised? To answer, we spoke with our friend and Wi-Fi expert Joel Crane

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and we'd like to thank him for giving us a nice strong assist. So beam forming can be implemented

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in one of two ways. One is to stick a bunch of antennas inside an access point and because each

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antenna is in a different physical spot, they'll all produce slightly different coverage patterns.

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The idea here is to decide which antenna combinations hear a client device like a phone

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most strongly whenever it's transmitting to the router. So the router tries different combinations

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until it finds the best one. Then it can time the transmissions from each antenna so that they all

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converge at the same time at the spot where it thinks the client is. It's kind of like throwing

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two rocks into a pond and seeing the spot where the ripples come together to form one larger ripple.

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This is called chip based beam forming and it was mainly pioneered by a company called Ruckus.

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But other manufacturers tend to use a different kind of beam forming built into the 802.11ac

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standard called sounding based beam forming. Here, the router continually talks to the client

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asking how good the signal is in order to decide how to time each broadcast from each antenna.

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But whichever kind of 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 10% better actually which can make a difference if you're

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trying to stream a video far from your router, for example. Well, that sounds great, right?

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But here's the issue. When the IEEE finalized the wireless AC standard, it made sounding based

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beam forming optional. And when part of a standard is merely optional, it's like an optional workplace

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function. Nobody shows up. So even if you buy an AC router that says it supports beam forming,

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odds are your phones and other gadgets you have lying about do not. And there are even plenty

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of higher end client devices that lack beam forming support. Making matters worse, it's often very

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difficult to tell whether a client device does support it from just looking at a spec sheet.

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The best way to tell is to use a packet capture program such as Wireshark which will give you

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technical information on the connection including whether a connected device supports beam forming.

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

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but there is a database of Wireshark readouts for a fair number of current client devices which we

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linked down below in the video description along with instructions on exactly what to look for.

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And even if you jump through all these hoops to get both a router and a client device that supports

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beam forming, remember that beam forming is one way. So you don't get the same advantages when

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the client is transmitting back to the router. So don't expect it to improve your upload speeds.

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At the end of the day, I wouldn't call beam forming snake oil, but it also probably isn't

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worth going on a perilous quest to make it part of your Wi-Fi setup. So thanks for watching guys,

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if you liked this video, like it, subscribe and be sure to hit us up in the comment section

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with your ideas for topics that we should cover in the future.