It has been noted that 320MHz is missing in action, and there is no 4096-QAM. I think the missing 320MHz option is just fine, in fact while not as revolutionary as removing floppy disks or CD/DVD drives – it’s about time we stop “measurbating” (I forget where I stole that from) about theoretical middle of the desert kind of throughput numbers.

I can see my neighbors Wi-Fi from across the street, and for several homes around me. I have been in apartments and condo buildings many times, observing 30+ beacons that are better than -80 on 5GHz. Now imagine you are outside of the U.S. with those kind of results and far fewer channels. When Wi-Fi sucks, people will blame the router, blame the ISP, blame the client devices, not likely understanding the shared nature of wireless.

I like to give the example of walkie talkies, to explain the half-duplex nature of Wi-Fi. We share spectrum, so if a slice of spectrum is allocated as 80MHz which is what a lot of 5GHz routers will be set to by default – then we are absorbing what could otherwise by 4x 20MHz channels. Now if 4 groups of people all want high bitrate transmissions on their walkie talkies maybe they select the “80MHz” option, but any one user who pushes to talk/transmit within those 4 groups of people will suddenly cause everyone else to wait, implementing a backoff timer. So while you might think a bigger truck carrying more payload that takes up 4 lanes of highway is way better, it isn’t always better if you have to share that 4 lane highway with all of the other uber-large trucks trying to do the same thing. We have to listen before sending, so backoff timers and SNR start to take a hit – causing spotty results. Now if you are able to coordinate, i.e. an office building network that you maintain or maybe friednly neighbors – choosing the 20MHz option in 5GHz is the good neighbor selection. You’ll get a more reliable network, with more than enough throughput to watch any 4k video several times over. 40MHz 5GHz may be on the table as well, I think in the U.S. if you have your own home this is likely going to work well, just as 40/80MHz 6GHz probably is just dandy.

Anyone who is into wireless already knows these things. It has been said go wide until you can’t. Most apartment/condo users I think fall into the “can’t” realm. Don’t use full width and full power just because you can, although your router probably is going to try and do it for you anyway. Auto-channel has long not worked that well, even in the commercial space (Radio Resource Management, choose your name…) but if you take big 80MHz channels you are soaking up for example U-NII-1, channel 36/40/44/48 are going to be the default go-to for all routers all over the world at 20/40 or 80MHz – causing you to just share that space with everybody else, and likely experiencing an incredibly varied experience. If you have mesh wireless extenders, then your channel availability and/or airtime is even further reduced.