Buying a router for a standard nobody finished

The wireless routers on sale this summer advertise three hundred megabits per second and comply with a specification that has not been finalised. Both of those things deserve more attention than they get.

Start with the number, because it is the one on the box. You will not see three hundred megabits. You will not see half of it. That figure describes what the radio can theoretically signal at, under conditions involving no walls, no neighbours, no microwave ovens, and no other devices on the same channel. Real throughput on a real network in a real building, after protocol overhead, is commonly a quarter of the advertised rate and frequently less.

Now ask what you would do with it if you had it. Most home broadband connections deliver somewhere between two and twenty megabits. Wireless stopped being the constraint on internet speed several years ago. The bottleneck is the line coming into the building, and no router improves that.

Which is a shame, because the new equipment genuinely is better, just not in the way it is being sold.

The real improvement is range and reliability. Multiple antennas do not merely add capacity, they take advantage of the fact that a signal bouncing off walls arrives by several paths at slightly different times, and reconstruct something usable from the mess. That is why coverage is better at the back of the house and why the connection stops dropping when somebody walks through the hall. It is the thing people actually complain about, and it is fixed, and nobody markets it because reliability does not produce a number.

Then there is the matter of buying hardware for an unratified standard.

The industry group has certified equipment against a draft, and vendors are promising that a firmware update will bring your router to the final version whenever the committee finishes. That promise costs nothing to make. It gets honoured sometimes, and the times it does not are the times a late change requires something the chipset cannot do, at which point the update quietly does not appear and the model is discontinued.

My advice would be to buy this equipment for the coverage, which is real and available now, and to treat compatibility with the finished specification as a bonus you have not paid for. If the promise is kept, good. If it is not, you still have a router that reaches the far bedroom, which is the only reason to replace the one you have.