The Wi-Fi Alliance, the the nonprofit organization that promotes and certifies Wi-Fi products, has announced its expanding its current Wi-Fi standard, Wi-Fi certified ac, to include new “wave 2” improvements. These improvements include potentially doubling transmission speeds by bumping maximum channel bandwidth from 80 MHz to 160 MHz.
Another important benefit is Multi-user Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO), a super-long acronym that means users will experience less network lag when multiple devices are operating at the same time by sending data to multiple devices at once rather than one at a time.
The update, known as 802.11ac wave 2, also adds a fourth spatial stream, which further improves the speed of the network, and extends 5GHz channel support, reducing congestion by minimizing the amount of networks operating on overlapping channels.
While all this sounds great, it’s useless if there are no devices that support the improvements. Luckily for consumers, the Wi-Fi Alliance says several existing devices and routers will support the new features. The group provides a list of those products in its blog post announcement.
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[source]Wi-Fi Alliance[/source]
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