WiFi 6 2x2 expected speeds?

The advertised speed is the signaling rate, not the throughput rate. Here's one way you can think about this. If you're talking with somebody, you can think of the signaling rate as how many letters per second it would take to write down everything you're saying in real time. But when you're holding a conversation with someone you're not just talking as fast as you possibly can. You have to pause to inhale. The other person sometimes wants to talk too. And there are other people in the room that might want to get a word in edgewise as well.

Imagine 10 people sitting at a table carrying on five conversations. You can shout over each other, but at some point the cacophony is going to make it hard to hear so you have to talk slower to be understood, and maybe you need to repeat yourself sometimes.

Now imagine a communication protocol that had to take all of that congestion into account. You would have to build things into it to confirm that the other side got your message correctly. You would need to build pauses into it so that two people don't start talking to each other at the same time. You need to take into account that awkward "go ahead" "no you" stuff.

Wi-Fi has very similar constraints. Just because you can transmit a certain number of bits per second doesn't mean the total throughput is going to match the bit per second rate. There is overhead, and there's a whole communication protocol going on that uses some of those bits and waste some of the air time to coordinate what device is going to transmit when. Even if you're operating this device in the middle of the ocean with only one access point and one client within a thousand miles, they follow the same protocol for negotiating transmit times, which means some amount of airtime will be silence rather than constant transmission.

802.11g has a signaling rate of 54 Mbps, and a real world realistic throughput of about 20 Mbps. If your gigabit access point is doing 400 Mbps of actual throughput, then you're doing pretty good.

/r/HomeNetworking Thread