[SOLVED] Signal radiation and correlation to data

[tomerg22]

Hi all.
I have a question I couldn't find an answer to.
Is there a correlation between the AP transmitting radiation and the amount of data/second being transmitted?
For example, if I use an AP for low res streaming and small amounts of data vs using it for HD streaming, will the transmitted RF radiation avg power be different?
Will it differ between different WIFI specs?

Thanks.

 

[alexoiu]

Hi, Interesting question. I'd say no. The amount of data transferred per time unit would be the same. Same the range. More power to the transmitter would imply longer range, I guess, right? There are standards that limit the amount of power for safety reasons.

Here: https://wlan1nde.wordpress.com/2014/11/26/wlan-maximum-transmission-power-etsi/

 

[bill001g]

It is actually much more complex that that.

The actual output power is limited to 1watt in most countries. Almost all routers transmit very close to this.

The amount of data you put into the signal depends on what encoding you place on signal. This is way to hard to even think to describe here. This is what makes 802.11g different from 802.11n or 802.11ac.

In addition the radios can run different encoding with different devices at the same time. So it may talk to one device with 802.11g and another with 802.11n.

Still the output power of the radio is constant when it is transmitting. This is where if you really want to confuse things you can try to claim the rf output changes. The radio will either send data at maximum power for whatever period of time it takes to transmit the data or it will transmit nothing so the power level is zero.

So you could get some average RF level but this is very misleading to do since the radio really only transmits at 1 power level.

 

[alexoiu]

It is actually much more complex that that.

The actual output power is limited to 1watt in most countries. Almost all routers transmit very close to this.

The amount of data you put into the signal depends on what encoding you place on signal. This is way to hard to even think to describe here. This is what makes 802.11g different from 802.11n or 802.11ac.

In addition the radios can run different encoding with different devices at the same time. So it may talk to one device with 802.11g and another with 802.11n.

Still the output power of the radio is constant when it is transmitting. This is where if you really want to confuse things you can try to claim the rf output changes. The radio will either send data at maximum power for whatever period of time it takes to transmit the data or it will transmit nothing so the power level is zero.

So you could get some average RF level but this is very misleading to do since the radio really only transmits at 1 power level.

Complex, indeed.

 

[tomerg22]

Thank you all for the info.
I wasn't aware of the ETSI regulation, so it seems all 2.4GHz is limited to 100mw and 5GHz according to channel band.
In general it seems that utilizing lower TX BW on the AP should produce lower average TX power but hard to estimate, maybe I'll find actual measurements numbers.