WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.360 It's common sense that aiming something in the direction you want it to go is generally helpful, 00:00:05.360 --> 00:00:08.640 whether you're shooting a hockey puck or visiting the men's room. 00:00:08.640 --> 00:00:12.720 But what about Wi-Fi? I mean, those little antennas that stick up from your home route 00:00:12.720 --> 00:00:17.840 are just kind of blast the signal out where it's in a 360 degree donut shape, which is fine. 00:00:17.840 --> 00:00:22.640 But what if you could aim your Wi-Fi signal toward the spots in your house where your gadgets 00:00:22.640 --> 00:00:28.000 actually are? It turns out that this is a real technique and it's called beam forming. But 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:33.280 does it really work as advertised? To answer, we spoke with our friend and Wi-Fi expert Joel Crane 00:00:33.280 --> 00:00:38.880 and we'd like to thank him for giving us a nice strong assist. So beam forming can be implemented 00:00:38.880 --> 00:00:45.520 in one of two ways. One is to stick a bunch of antennas inside an access point and because each 00:00:45.520 --> 00:00:50.960 antenna is in a different physical spot, they'll all produce slightly different coverage patterns. 00:00:50.960 --> 00:00:56.720 The idea here is to decide which antenna combinations hear a client device like a phone 00:00:56.720 --> 00:01:02.400 most strongly whenever it's transmitting to the router. So the router tries different combinations 00:01:02.400 --> 00:01:07.840 until it finds the best one. Then it can time the transmissions from each antenna so that they all 00:01:07.840 --> 00:01:13.840 converge at the same time at the spot where it thinks the client is. It's kind of like throwing 00:01:13.840 --> 00:01:19.760 two rocks into a pond and seeing the spot where the ripples come together to form one larger ripple. 00:01:19.760 --> 00:01:24.640 This is called chip based beam forming and it was mainly pioneered by a company called Ruckus. 00:01:24.640 --> 00:01:30.720 But other manufacturers tend to use a different kind of beam forming built into the 802.11ac 00:01:30.720 --> 00:01:37.360 standard called sounding based beam forming. Here, the router continually talks to the client 00:01:37.360 --> 00:01:42.800 asking how good the signal is in order to decide how to time each broadcast from each antenna. 00:01:42.800 --> 00:01:48.560 But whichever kind of beam forming you use though, you do get the benefits of better speed at long 00:01:48.560 --> 00:01:54.320 range and better range overall. Up to 10% better actually which can make a difference if you're 00:01:54.320 --> 00:01:59.760 trying to stream a video far from your router, for example. Well, that sounds great, right? 00:01:59.760 --> 00:02:06.320 But here's the issue. When the IEEE finalized the wireless AC standard, it made sounding based 00:02:06.320 --> 00:02:12.960 beam forming optional. And when part of a standard is merely optional, it's like an optional workplace 00:02:12.960 --> 00:02:19.600 function. Nobody shows up. So even if you buy an AC router that says it supports beam forming, 00:02:19.680 --> 00:02:24.640 odds are your phones and other gadgets you have lying about do not. And there are even plenty 00:02:24.640 --> 00:02:30.560 of higher end client devices that lack beam forming support. Making matters worse, it's often very 00:02:30.560 --> 00:02:35.440 difficult to tell whether a client device does support it from just looking at a spec sheet. 00:02:35.440 --> 00:02:40.320 The best way to tell is to use a packet capture program such as Wireshark which will give you 00:02:40.320 --> 00:02:45.360 technical information on the connection including whether a connected device supports beam forming. 00:02:45.360 --> 00:02:50.080 Of course, this requires you to actually have the gadget on hand before you buy it, 00:02:50.080 --> 00:02:55.520 but there is a database of Wireshark readouts for a fair number of current client devices which we 00:02:55.520 --> 00:02:59.920 linked down below in the video description along with instructions on exactly what to look for. 00:02:59.920 --> 00:03:05.360 And even if you jump through all these hoops to get both a router and a client device that supports 00:03:05.360 --> 00:03:11.600 beam forming, remember that beam forming is one way. So you don't get the same advantages when 00:03:11.600 --> 00:03:17.920 the client is transmitting back to the router. So don't expect it to improve your upload speeds. 00:03:17.920 --> 00:03:22.480 At the end of the day, I wouldn't call beam forming snake oil, but it also probably isn't 00:03:22.480 --> 00:03:27.920 worth going on a perilous quest to make it part of your Wi-Fi setup. So thanks for watching guys, 00:03:27.920 --> 00:03:31.760 if you liked this video, like it, subscribe and be sure to hit us up in the comment section 00:03:31.760 --> 00:03:35.120 with your ideas for topics that we should cover in the future.