When will dual band Wi-Fi cards be standard equipment?

Most laptops don’t have (or even offer as an option) dual band Wi-Fi cards, yet many routers are dual band. When will this change?

 

Uhm, yeah they do. You're looking at the wrong systems if you don't see them included.

 

I am waiting for Super Wifi.

'Super Wi-Fi' Has 100km Range, Is Coming to Save the Day | PCWorld

 

The average user doesn't care about WLAN cards, so usually they get the cheapest Realtek/Atheros rebrand cards. Worst case just buy a dual band Intel WLAN card for XX laptop aftermarket and do the swap yourself, that's what I did with my brother's M5030. It came with a junk Atheros N, single antennae card. I put in a 2x2 antennae and an Intel 6200 for a grand total of 15 shipped from eBay.

 

Sure you can configure an HP Envy or a high end Dell with a dual band card, but most systems (especially preconfigured systems) still don't have them. Some manufacturers don’t even offer them as an option on any of their models.

 

In many cases I think the average user is surprised to discover that his/her new laptop won’t connect to both bands on his/her new router. People make the mistake of assuming that Wireless-N automatically means dual band access.

It’s not always easy to swap out the WiFi card in a laptop. I read that some laptops have a white list of cards in the BIOS. Any card not on the list will not work. And some people are not handy enough to do it by themselves.

 

AFAIK all FIOS have a stock G router/modem all in 1 unit. Many people don't have dual band router, I'd probably say alot of people still don't have wireless N routers so I think your dual band claim is a little off.

Yes Lenovo and HP whitelist WLAN but that can easily be fixed by buying their own FRU branded WLAN card to avoid the whitelist, and OEM FRU parts are like 1-2 dollars more. Plus most WLAN cards are a cinch to change.

 

Most consumers would be doing good to know what 2.4GHz N is. Much less 5GHz. Most could care less if they're notebook has dual-band. They just want it to connect hassle free to their router.

My thoughts as to when dual-band will become commodity is when it becomes necessary to supply the general internet speeds. A G-band router isn't what you need if you have 50Mbps service, and 50Mbps is becoming more commonplace especially with cable/fiber ISP's. When the speeds start moving up more, so will standard wireless speeds.

The minimum now is single stream N @ 150Mbps, so we have a while to go.

 

So most likely they will eventually just use wi-fi and no hard wires then? Would be nice if you could be in an area with overlapping signals so if one goes down you have one or two more to choose from. Problem is I can see 100km from a high powered radio tower but for home use unless you put an antenna on your roof, your upstream speeds would be quite limited.

 

Most, except my N43SL. Apparently Asus thinks that Wifi cards should not be user changeable, so I had to remove the entire motherboard to replace the wifi card

 

The last 2 revisions (E&F) of the actiontek router that FIOS gives you are 802.11 N. I'll have to go back and look at the settings at home to see if it supports 5 gHz band.

 

I’m not saying that everyone cares or even knows about dual-band. But I do think that many people believe they are getting it when they are not. Go to any laptop company’s website that has community support and search for 5ghz. There will be a number of posts that go something like this: There’s something wrong with the wireless on my new laptop. It doesn’t see the 5 GHz band on my dual-band router. The answer is always the same and people are surprised to learn that their WiFi card doesn’t support 5 GHz.

 

Sometimes it's not that simple to get around the whitelist. See the following thread for an example:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...n-whitelist-hp-authorized-wireless-cards.html