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> The Broadcom WiFi support 320Mhz while N1 is stuck with 160Mhz.

I was at a Wi-Fi vendor presentation a while back and they said that 160 Mhz is pretty improbable unless you're leaving alone and no wireless networks around you. And 320 Mhz even less so.

In real life probably the best you can get is 80 Mhz in a really good wireless environment.



For which band? I run 160/160 on 5/6ghz and it’s nice. They are short range enough to work. For 2.4 yeah 20mhz only


For 5ghz, that's a pretty unusual. You need to be somewhere where DFS isn't an issue to even get 160mhz.

For 6ghz? Yeah, not uncommon.


Indeed, in any relatively dense setting no one should even think about using channels that wide. Think about the original problem with 2.4ghz 802.11b/g: there were only three non-overlapping channels, so you had interference no matter where you went. Why would we want to return to that hell?


My limited experience:

2.4Ghz is pretty much only used by IoT, you generally don't care about channel width there. When your client device (laptop, phone) downgrades to 2.4Ghz it might as well disconnect because it's unusable.

5Ghz get stopped by a drywall, so unless your walls are just right to bounce off single, you need AP in every room. Ceiling mounting is pretty much required and you're pretty much free to use channels as wide as your device support and local laws allow.

6Ghz get stopped by a piece of paper, so the same as 5Ghz except you won't get 6Ghz unless you have haev direct line of sight to the AP.


I would believe that MLO or similar features could make it a bit more likely that large amounts of bandwidth would be useful, as it allows using discontiguous frequencies.

WiFi does currently get anywhere near the bandwidth that these huge channels advertise in realistic environments.


OFDMA also makes it more useful, but I don't know if vendors actually use that in practice.


Given that they had WiFi 6 as trial I expect WiFi 7 to have it ironed out for OFDMA. And MLO to be not working until WiFi 8.




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