[SOLVED] In the 5 GHz band is 802.11ac and 802.11n simultaneously supported?

[nonag]

Hi All

I have router that supports 802.11 AC (5GHz) - it's an Atlice one box - Wireless N/AC (802.11n 2.4GHz 3x3, 802.11ac 5GHz 4x4). This is what I read from an Atlice One FAQ on dslreports.

I have the first client connected to the router in 802.11 AC mode. Then I connected a second client with an older wifi card that does NOT support ac mode but connects to the router in 802.11 N mode. In this scenarios is the router supposed to maintain both AC & N mode on the 5GHz band? Or does it fall back to N - mode on the first client?

I guess this is kind of a vague question as it "may" be very hardware specific. But are the AC enabled routers configured to work in both modes at the same time (on the same 5GHz band) on different machines? Would the client using the AC mode suffer in performance due to the introduction of the N client?

Thanks for any insight.

 

[bill001g]

Kinda yes and no. Technically the device does not drop back to "n" mode. Since 802.11ac includes all the data encoding methods of 802.11n it will connect to 802.11n. So you kinda have 802.11ac on one end and 802.11n on the other but they are using the same data encoding. Mostly it depends on how picky you want to get but it will work fine.

 

[nonag]

Kinda yes and no. Technically the device does not drop back to "n" mode. Since 802.11ac includes all the data encoding methods of 802.11n it will connect to 802.11n. So you kinda have 802.11ac on one end and 802.11n on the other but they are using the same data encoding. Mostly it depends on how picky you want to get but it will work fine.

So when you have an AC device and N device connected at the same time, the AC device does not have any benefits of the AC mode like beam forming and the advertised AC throughput. Is that safe to assume ?

If that is the case then AC mode benefits are given up with the introduction of a single N mode (ie. non-AC) client.


Thanks! I'm just trying to get an understanding on how the modes works and if it's actually fruitful to have a great 802.11AC router with varying capabilities of 802.11 clients.

 

[bill001g]

Beam forming and mu-mimo stuff are mostly smoke and mirrors by the marketing guys they provide very little benefit in the real world. It is actually very hard to test and see that it helps because of so much interference in home environments from neighbors wifi.

Just like the higher encoding speeds that 802.11ac supports. Things like beamforming etc are used for client that can use them and not for clients that can't. A wifi radio is not actually simultaneously talking to end devices it is changing very quickly between the clients and can change the method it is encoding on the fly.

Still this can happen even if a device is 802.11ac and it gets poor signal and drops back to the slower 802.11n encodings.