Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Can Your Router AIM Your WiFi? – BeamForming Explained”.
It’S common sense that aiming something in the direction you wanted to go is generally helpful, whether you’re shooting a hockey puck or visiting the men’s room. But what about Wi-Fi? I mean those little antennas that stick up from your home router just kind of blast the signal or is enough 360-degree donut shape, which is fine. But what, if you could aim your Wi-Fi signal toward the spots in your house where your gadgets actually are? It turns out that this is a real technique and it’s called beamforming, but does it really work as advertised to answer? We spoke with our friend and Wi-Fi expert, Joel crane and we’d like to thank him for giving us a nice strong assist, so beamforming can be implemented in one of two ways. One is to stick a bunch of antennas inside an access point and because each tena is in a different physical spot, they’ll all produce slightly different coverage patterns. The idea here is to decide which antenna combinations here, a client device like a phone most strongly whenever it’s transmitting to the router. So the router tries different combinations until it finds the best one. Then it can time the transmissions from each antenna so that they all converge at the same time, at the spot, where it thinks the client is it’s kind of like throwing two rocks into a pond and seeing the the spot, where the ripples come together to form One larger ripple, this is called chip based beamforming and it was mainly pioneered by a company called ruckus, but other manufacturers tend to use a different kind of beamforming built into the eight o 2.11 AC standard called sounding based beamforming. Here the router continually talks to the client asking how good the signal is in order to decide how to time each broadcast from each antenna, but whichever kind of beamforming you use, though you do get the benefits of better speed at long range and better range. Overall, up to ten percent better, actually, which can make a difference if you’re trying to stream a video far from your router, for example. Well, that sounds great right, but here’s the issue when the I Triple E finalized, the wireless AC standard it made sounding based, beamforming optional and when part of a standard is merely optional. It’S like an optional workplace function.
Nobody shows up. So, even if you buy an AC router that says it supports beamforming odds are your phones and other gadgets you have lying about, do not, and there are even plenty of higher-end client devices that lack beamforming support making matters worse. It’S often very difficult to tell whether a client device does support it from just looking at a spec sheet. The best way to tell is to use a packet capture program such as Wireshark, which will give you technical information on the connection, including whether a connected device supports beamforming. Of course, this requires you to actually have the gadget on hand before you buy it, but there is a database of Wireshark readouts for a fair number of current client devices, which we linked down below in the video description, along with instructions on exactly what to look.
For and even if you jump through, all these hoops to get both a router and a client device that supports beamforming, remember that beamforming is one way, so you don’t get the same advantages when the client is transmitting back to the router. So don’t expect it to improve your upload speeds. At the end of the day, I wouldn’t call beamforming snake-oil, but it also probably isn’t worth going on a perilous quest to make it part of your Wi-Fi setup.
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