A few years ago networking was pretty stale. Gigabit wired networking was the pinnacle of achievement for consumers and small offices and 802.11n had reached a maximum capacity of 300-450Mbps theoretical throughput. There was nothing exciting going on so companies decided to once again try powerline networking. This filled a gap that allowed better ranges and still decent throughput using the wiring in your building. Still, it was nothing all that groundbreaking. Recently the introduction of 802.11ac networking has prompted some excitement however. This new networking standard uses the 5GHz band and is backwards compatible with the 802.11n 2.4GHz band. This means that a 802.11ac network should work with all of your older 2.4GHz equipment, but at the same time offer you a lot more performance if you have compatible hardware.

The specifications show that we could see wireless speeds of over 1Gb per second (in a multi-station environment) but we should be able to see single-link speeds of up to 500Mbps. Of course this is all still theoretical speeds, but we are seeing some claims that certainly exceed the boring 450Mbps speed on a dual-band 802.11n network.