Everything You Need to Know About 802.11ac

What Is 802.11ac?

802.11ac is a wireless networking standard. More specifically, it’s the fifth generation of the IEEE 802.11 set of protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication.

The 802.11ac standard was released in 2014 to provide high-throughput wireless local area networks on the 5 GHz band. The comparison table below shows how 802.11ac WiFi stacks up against other WiFi standards that came before and after it:

As you can see, 802.11ac is the successor to 802.11n. The biggest difference between the two WiFi standards as far as end-users are concerned is the fact that the newer standard supports a maximum throughput of up to 6,933 Mbit/s. That’s a huge jump from 600 Mbit/s, a maximum throughput supported by 802.11n.

802.11ac Real-World Speeds

The impressive 802.11ac max speed is accomplished by combining wider WiFi channels with up to eight MIMO spatial streams and high-density modulation, among other things.

Theoretically, it should be possible to achieve a maximum throughput of up to around 7 Gbit/s (that’s with 802.11ac Wave 2 — Wave 1 supports the maximum throughput of up to 1.3 Gbit/s), but that’s only when all available channels are used at the same time, and that almost never happens in the real-world.

Why not? Because real-world performance is affected by everything from signal interference to the physical distance between wireless devices. What’s more, not all available 802.11ac routers are equally fast. Manufacturers typically specify how fast they are by assigning them different AC numbers, like this:

• AC1200: combined throughput of 1,200 Mbit/s
• AC1900: combined throughput of 1,900 Mbit/s
• AC3200: combined throughput of 3,200 Mbit/s

To achieve the fastest speeds on the 802.11ac frequency band, we strongly recommend you use a WiFi analysis and troubleshooting app like NetSpot to optimize the placement and configuration of your router.

You can use NetSpot to learn everything you need to know about other WiFi networks in your area, and the tool can even create a detailed coverage map of your own network to reveal all areas of signal weakness.

In addition to 802.11ac, NetSpot works with all standard 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax wireless network adapters, and it supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands on 20/40/80/160 MHz channels.