Current state of wireless routers marketing

[Noo]

Is Bullshit. If my router have 8 gigabit ports, should I sell it as a superrouter 80,000acs or whatever random bs generic router name?

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

 

[DesiPower]

8 gb ports? don't remember seeing so many on a router...
ACS is wireless standard, GB ports are wired
multi band can actually transmit at quoted speeds if wireless card at the receiving end supports the same number of channels

Shaka, when the walls fell...

 

[mundane]

Ars had a nice writeup on the distinction between advertised theoretical maximum speeds and the harsh reality:
https://arstechnica.com/information...hat-a-deep-dive-into-why-wi-fi-kind-of-sucks/

Mark me in the camp of "oh, I'll use DD-WRT and crank up my TX power". Now I know better.

 

[Noo]

Find me a device that can get close to gigabit speed on wireless. Yet there's an abundance of wireless routers that are "3200, 5400, etc.."

What's their excuse? oh it's the combine bandwidth of all possible channels....that is like saying that if you combine all ports on a switch and advertise that it's an 80Gb router.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Wireless speed is weirdly advertised. Even enterprise gear. I have a Unifi AP, it has a 10/100 port, yet it's advertised as 300mbps. There's some weird reason behind it, but it just makes no sense, you can't push 300mbps over 100mbps link. I think for wireless they count transmit and receive separately or something, but still that would be 200mbps. I guess you could have more than 100mbps of data flowing between other wireless devices, but if you're going to consider that, then my 24 port switch must be 24 gigabit. lol. Well to be fair switches typically do have a rating of how much data they can handle at once, but it's not a number they actually advertise it's just a spec.

What I do find funny about consumer routers now days is how many antennas they keep adding to them. Some of them have like 8 freaking antennas. LOL. I don't know if those actually do anything or if it's just to give people the sense that it's faster. Moores law for RF. By 2020, routers will have no less than 9,000 antennas!

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Find me a device that can get close to gigabit speed on wireless. Yet there's an abundance of wireless routers that are "3200, 5400, etc.."
What's their excuse? oh it's the combine bandwidth of all possible channels....that is like saying that if you combine all ports on a switch and advertise that it's an 80Gb router.

Ah, now I understand the OP
Kinda ridiculous that routers look like headcrabs nowadays...

Then again, I've never taken wireless very seriously.
Nothing beats the simplicity, reliability and consistency of a good, old-fashioned CATx line

 

[Noo]

Their's no weird reason behind it, it's pure marketing bs and they need to put a stop to it. you can put all the antennas on the router you want but don't deceptively insinuate what the actually speed i'll get by putting bs numbers on the router.

 

[sdifox]

Next version of firmware will push the link speed value to your device. It will always show "Over 9000", regardless of actual link speed.

 

[Anubis]

relevant

https://arstechnica.com/information...what-a-deep-dive-into-why-wi-fi-kind-of-sucks

 

[Riverhound777]

Wireless speed is weirdly advertised. Even enterprise gear. I have a Unifi AP, it has a 10/100 port, yet it's advertised as 300mbps. There's some weird reason behind it, but it just makes no sense, you can't push 300mbps over 100mbps link. I think for wireless they count transmit and receive separately or something, but still that would be 200mbps. I guess you could have more than 100mbps of data flowing between other wireless devices, but if you're going to consider that, then my 24 port switch must be 24 gigabit. lol. Well to be fair switches typically do have a rating of how much data they can handle at once, but it's not a number they actually advertise it's just a spec.

Well that I can explain. The 300mbps is megabits, while the 10/100 is megabytes. 300mbps is 37.5 MBps.

 

[TwiceOver]

Well that I can explain. The 300mbps is megabits, while the 10/100 is megabytes. 300mbps is 37.5 MBps.

Well, no. Transfer speed, in general, is measured in bits. 10/100 is in megabits, same as the AC "300" which is also in bits. Storage space is, in general, measured in bytes, such as gigabytes.

The reason wifi is such a funk BS speed number is that they are aggregating both up and down to make you feel better about the number they put on the package. So Wireless N 300 is 150/150 up/down half duplex, meaning it can only do one or the other at any given time. They combine the two numbers to make it seem better than it really is. Take out the wifi overhead, error checking, etc, and yeah you're probably near maxing out that ethernet 10/100 connection which is full duplex and can transmit and receive 100/100 up/down at the same time.

 

[Red Squirrel]

relevant

https://arstechnica.com/information...what-a-deep-dive-into-why-wi-fi-kind-of-sucks

That's a pretty interesting read. The way marketing depts can manipulate info and "technically" be correct is infuriating. I personally could not do that if I was selling a product. I would test my product in a slightly above normal case scenario, and advertise that as the speed. But then people just look at numbers so they would not buy it because they think it's way lower than the others. This seems to be the thing with all products now days, just look at flashlights and lumen ratings. 3000 lumens out of a single LED module in which the datasheet says 300? I don't think so. But somehow they can advertise that.

 

[drinkmorejava]

arstechnica just had a writeup on the hilarious state of wireless marketing

https://arstechnica.com/information...hat-a-deep-dive-into-why-wi-fi-kind-of-sucks/

Edit: This was already posted. Now I feel dumb.

 

[PliotronX]

Well that I can explain. The 300mbps is megabits, while the 10/100 is megabytes. 300mbps is 37.5 MBps.

Not quite, 10Mbits and 100Mbits, 1.2MBytes (typically half duplex) and 11MBytes. Still faster and more reliable than 90% of the Wi-Fi that I see in use. The imaginary 300Mbits is derived from the link speed which is divided into 1/3 for the laboratory condition maximum throughput. Typically see between 30 and 70 on that kind of link. The Ars article goes into great detail.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

I love my Google Wifi.. except for that one time their servers crashed and messed up everyone's wifi.

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

More channels also means less packet collision! Thus the real advantage.