Most current Wi-Fi 6 devices are 2-stream with max link rate of 1200Mbps.
Agreed / also since they tend to have 1GE ports on them you're going to run into a bottleneck
Theoretical maximums are used by router manufacturers for marketing purposes.
Always the case when people are shopping looking for the biggest numbers when not taking into account the physical port speed being 1GE or now more prevalent 2.5GE.
Wireless backhaul is still the main Wi-Fi 6 advantage.
Meh, it's more about how the signals / traffic are sorted and moved across the data planes. Backhaul is more geared towards "nodes" than STA's.
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In general though what is most restrictive by consumer grade systems is a 2x2 antenna layout.
When moving outside of consumer grade equipment you hit 4x4 antenna layouts and thus handle traffic better.
To the more extreme end you have 8x8 systems as well meant for dense environments with a ton of clients connected at the same time.
What do 1x1, 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, etc., mean in MU-MIMO technology?
These figures indicate the number of antennas in a wireless AP, router or endpoint and thus the number of simultaneous spatial streams it can support. A Wi-Fi 5 Wave 2 AP might bear a 4x4 label, for example, indicating it has a four-antenna configuration -- with four transmitters and four receivers -- and can support four concurrent spatial streams. A 2x2 smartphone has two antennas, while a 1x1 device has just one. A Wi-Fi 6 AP has up to eight transmitting and receiving antennas (8x8), enabling it to simultaneously transmit to eight 1x1 clients, four 2x2 clients, two 4x4 clients, etc.
Wi-Fi's MU-MIMO technology plays an important role in high-efficiency wireless networking, enabling a single access point to connect with multiple client devices at once. Learn the difference between MIMO vs. MU-MIMO, MU-MIMO vs. SU-MIMO and more.
www.techtarget.com
It’s a big breakthrough in wireless connectivity, but don’t let MU-MIMO’s limitations catch you off guard. Here are 10 ways to get up to speed on MU-MIMO Wi-Fi.
www.networkworld.com
In my case I'm using a business type AP to server WIFI and LR's hit 2400mbps but, throughput is limited by the adapter hitting ~1.5gbps over the LAN. Phone tops out with a LR of 1200.
The limiting factors at this point for 802.11ax/e are the adapters / AP's. In the case of adapters everything I come across has an AX200 / AX210 and gets marketed under different sellers / packaging and missing from the market are Qualcomm / Realtek based options for some reason even a year plus into the release. On the HW side with AP's there's still only a handful of options for 6 let alone 6E unless you want to spend a ton of cash on them. There are some AP''s on the edge of release though in the near term and prices will drop to more competitive levels as they flood the market. 6E HW though seems to be moving at a snail's pace even though the client HW is gaining market share.
The issue I see is Laptop OEM's shipping cheap adapters that lead to complaints about slow speeds when connecting to higher end WIFI systems. The supply chain still pumping out older tech doesn't help move adoption along either. Cutoff the old tech and move to the new tech and thins would progress a lot quicker. Depleting the old adapters and forcing them to a secondary market / resale kills off obsolete tech. There's no reason for any company to still be selling B/G/N setups but, you still find them. AC while still "recent" is already over a decade old at this point.