What is up with the lack of AC1750 - AC1900 wifi adapters?

[Razor512]

Many companies are now pushing past AC1750 to move onto AC1900, but no one seems to be working on wifi adapters that can do 5GHz at 1300mbit, or 2.4GHz at 600mbit.

Will we ever see the day when wifi clients can support the latest generation of wifi adapters, or will we always be in a situation where unless you bridge 2 of the same routers together, you will never connect to the router at the advertised rate?


(pretty much all of the wifi adapters except that one overpriced one from asus, are 2 stream cards)

 

[thiggins]

The main reason is that the push for 11ac is higher bandwidth for mobile devices. These don't have the space or power to spare for 3x3 adapters, except perhaps for notebooks.

 

[Razor512]

But even with many laptop wifi adapters. No one seems to be making anything along the lines of the ultimate n 6300 for for 802.11ac.

eg for intel it seems like a case where someone in charge was going to make the workers make a new 802.11ac adapter for laptops but when it came time to specify how many streams the wifi adapter should support, The person was so close to pushing the number 3 key on the keyboard but the 800cc's of pentobarbital kicked in and they ended up hitting the number 2 instead, and we ended up with the Intel 7260.

an AC1750 adapter for a desktop PC while great, seems only useful for benchmarking since a user with a desktop PC is likely to use ethernet.

 

[thiggins]

Here is some info to put things in perspective from the other side:

- The best selling wireless adapter of any kind is an N300. It sells in the tens of thousands of units / month.

- All of the N450 class adapters combined sell at about half the volume of the single best-selling N300 adapter.

- The ASUS PCE-AC66 sells less than 1000 units /month.

- The best selling AC adapter is a 2x2 with USB 2.0 that sells less than 10,000 units/month.

Bottom line: 3x3 ain't where the $ is.