IEEE 802.11ac is the latest standard for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology. It represents a significant performance increase over its predecessor, 802.11n. 802.11n provided the basic wireless connectivity and speed required for businesses to adopt WiFi in their day-to-day operations. The 802.11ac WLAN standard allows for higher theoretical speeds in the 5-GHz band. 802.11ac is coming to market in two releases: Wave 1 and Wave 2.
NETGEAR began shipping the following 802.11ac Wave 1 access points in 2015:
Wave 2 of the 802.11ac standard builds upon Wave 1 with the following key additional functionalities:
- Higher speed with up to 2.3 Gbps (1.7 Gbps in the 5 GHz range)
- Multi-user multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) support for better use of frequency
- More robust signal encoding with 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), enabling 33% improved signal integrity
- Support for a fourth spatial stream to improve performance
NETGEAR began shipping its first 802.11ac Wave 2 access point, the WAC740, in 2016. For more information about the WAC740, visit What are the features of the WAC740 802.11ac Wave 2 Wireless Access Point?