TRIBAND 160MHZ VS SINGLE 160

[ulaganath]

I believe the 160mhz works on AC band is this possible on 2.4ghz as well. As it is combining 2 x 80mhz.

As far i know. 2.4ghz only have upto 40mhz bandwidth.

Was the above misleading as i can see it is tri band router but the 5ghz is only 2 so it cant be tri stream 160mhz

 

[System Error Message]

it doesnt combine 2x80Mhz, it uses a much larger frequency range for it's encoding. For 80Mhz there are 2 ways, you either encode at the size of 80Mhz or you can have 4x 20Mhz streams, very likely its the first one. So for the 160Mhz it will encode at the 160Mhz range. On 2.4ghz it cant do 160Mhz as thats a huge difference. On 2.4Ghz each stream is 20Mhz. The frequency determines the range and how much encoding can fit as a high frequency just makes the footprint smaller allowing for more bandwidth but reduced range.

On 5Ghz it started out with a large frequency range but now is crowded except for DFS channels and some non DFS. If i select a high frequency within a range i only get 54Mb/s of wireless AC, if i select the middle frequency of a 5Ghz range i can get the full 160Mhz bandwidth but it is very wide on the 5Ghz (you really gotta start using a phone app for example to actually see the frequencies and how wide the encoding is).

 

[ColinTaylor]

I believe the 160mhz works on AC band is this possible on 2.4ghz as well. As it is combining 2 x 80mhz.

As far i know. 2.4ghz only have upto 40mhz bandwidth.

Was the above misleading as i can see it is tri band router but the 5ghz is only 2 so it cant be tri stream 160mhz

The confusion comes for the terms they are using.

A tri-band router has 3 radios, 1 for 2.4GHz and 2 for 5GHz.

The 5GHz band only has enough width for 2 x 160MHz channels. There are no 160MHz channels on 2.4MHz.

Tri-stream refers to using 3 antennas (Spatial Streams) on one channel. So a router with 3 antennas using one 160MHz channel could achieve 2.6Gbps (3 x 867 MHz)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac#Data_rates_and_speed

So looking at the advertisement, where it says "3 x 160MHz at 867Mbps" it should really say "3 x 867Mbps using 160MHz".

 

[thiggins]

I wouldn't worry too much about this. The only time you have any chance of using 160 MHz bandwidth is with a second copy of a router supporting it in bridge mode and if the router supports 5 GHz DFS channels.

160 MHz is intended to enable mobile devices using two antennas to reach link rates equivalent of 4x4 routers running standard 80 MHz 802.11ac bandwidth.

I discussed this in How To Buy A Wireless Router - 2017 Edition

 

[sfx2000]

Getting out of "tri-band" semantics...

160MHz is basically a checkbox feature - whether 80+80 or 160 wide...

Just like 2.4GHz has shown that 20MHz is the best solution - the physics are what they are...

11ac - best return is 80MHz single channel - one might actually see benefits at longer ranges on 5GHz with 40MHz channels actually.

It gets into deep RF physics - the 10K level view is the wider the channel, the more multiple paths the signal has to do - so sometimes it is better, sometimes, not so good - but at the same time, it's more computation in the baseband.

The AtoD EVM performance on 160MHz is also a factor here - the noise floor, both external and internal, at that bandwidth is extremely adverse to medium ranges - it's similar to what we see with higher order QAM...

I wouldn't sweat 160MHz channels to be honest... in many ways, if one has the option, most clients are going to go 80MHz on association.

 

[sfx2000]

160 MHz is intended to enable mobile devices using two antennas to reach link rates equivalent of 4x4 routers running standard 80 MHz 802.11ac bandwidth.

I discussed this in How To Buy A Wireless Router - 2017 Edition

160MHz and MU-MIMO - which are Wave 2 features (inside the spec) - most clients and most home networks aren't going to benefit here, and many might actually see a performance decrease.

And then we have the proprietary stuff - NitroQAM and the like - which can take a client off the deep end...

That being said - the Wave2 chipsets, in a 11ac/11n environment, can perform quite well within the 11ac Wave 1 specs - most CPU, better baseband, perhaps even better radios.