802.11ac or 5G Wi-Fi: This latest Wi-Fi standard operates only on the 5GHz frequency band and offers Wi-Fi speeds of up to 1.3Gbps (or 1,300Mbps).
It’s backward-compatible with N, meaning that a 5G Wi-Fi router will support N clients and 5G Wi-Fi clients will also be able to connect to an N router. Wireless-N, in turn, is backward compatible with the rest of the wireless standards, including 802.11g, 802.11b, and 802.11a.
That means you can replace a router at home right now with a 5G Wi-Fi router and existing wireless devices, such as your laptop, iPad, iPhone, and so on, no matter how old, and they will still connect to your network the way they have always worked. To have the devices to work at the speed of 5G Wi-Fi, however, both the clients and the router need to support 5G Wi-Fi.
Clients like desktop and laptop computers will be able to upgrade to 5G Wi-Fi via add-in PCIe cards, Mini-PCI cards, or USB adapters. Later this year, mobile devices and computers with built-in 5G Wi-Fi support will be available.
Similar to Wireless-N, 802.11ac, for now, comes in three tiers, based on the number of streams. The more streams, the more bandwidth a device can handle. For example, Wireless-N has caps of 150Mbps with single-stream, 300Mbps with dual-stream, and 450Mbps with three-stream. 5G Wi-Fi connections are set to be about three times faster, starting with 450Mbps in single-stream, 900Mbps (dual-stream) and 1.3Gbps (three-stream). So technically, 5G Wi-Fi is the first wireless standard that breaks the gigabit barrier.
How 802.11ac is different from 802.11n
The biggest difference, other than the improved speeds, that 802.11ac has over Wireless-N is the fact that 5G Wi-Fi works solely on the 5Ghz band and supports channel width, for now, up to 80Mhz (as opposed to 20Mhz of N).
To make 802.11ac hardware truly backward-compatible with N devices, which are available in both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands, all 5G Wi-Fi devices will come with 802.11n on the 2.4Ghz band. In other words, when you buy a 5G Wi-Fi wireless router, it will have 802.11ac on the 5Ghz band and 802.11n on the 2.4Ghz band and will be able to operate both at the same time. This goes the same for 5G Wi-Fi clients; they will also support N on the 2.4Ghz band.
Interesting fact
Did you know that soon we will also have AD Routers? They will be capable of speeds as fast as 7Gbps……wow……we better sell those N150 left on the shelves ASAP….!
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