by Jon Brodkin - May 20 2014, 2:00pm GMTST
Wi-Fi equipment based on the new 802.11ac standard—often called Gigabit Wi-Fi—has been on the market for nearly two years. These products offer greater bandwidth and other improvements over gear based on the older 802.11n specification, but they don’t implement one of the most impressive features of 11ac.
It was simply too complicated to deploy all the upgrades at once, hardware makers say. As a result, 11ac networks actually waste a lot of capacity when serving devices like smartphones and tablets. This shortcoming should be fixed over the next year with new networking equipment and upgrades to end-user devices. Once everything is in place, Wi-Fi networks will be better able to serve lots of devices at once, particularly the mobile devices that every single person in the US seemingly has in his or her hands every minute of the day.
The soon-to-be-deployed technology is called MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple-input and multiple-output), which is like a wireless "switch" that sends different data to different receivers at the same time.
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