How fast is 802.11ac in the real world?

Are we still talking about a small fraction of the speed of Gigabit Ethernet, or is something close to 1 Gbps realistic?

 

It is a small fraction technically speaking. With a two staram AC card (these are the only one available) you can get some 35MB/s which equals 280mbps.

 

Well Gb ethernet dont get 1Gbps in real world. So something like 1/3?

Though i am curious to see some ac to ac(through router or ad-hoc type operation) number instead of ac to lan(seems to be what everyone is doing and not exciting).

 

On a Gigabit Ethernet you get almost exactly that usually above 900mbps.

 

The fastest router CNET tested (Asus AC68U) transferred up to 521 Mbps (approx. 65 MB/s) using 802.11ac, which is still slower than gigabit ethernet (approx. 800-900 Mbps or 100-112 MB/s), but considerably faster than routers that can only go up to 802.11n (up to 180 Mbps or approx. 22 MB/s). Mainstream 802.11ac routers averaged up to around 250 Mbps (approx. 31 MB/s), in comparison to 802.11n-limited average up to around 120 Mbps (15 MB/s). So there's a big speed advantage for 802.11ac no matter how you look at it (unless you're comparing with wired networking). You will, however, need an 802.11ac-compatible wireless card along with an 802.11ac router to take advantage of it.

 

The ~65MB/s result has been most likely achieved with another AC68U though- for the lack of three stream cards.
So while it is theoretically achievable it's not something that can be achieved at home at this point (which is not to say it won't be but it's not a "real world" speed at the moment - that is unless there are some proper three stream cards that I'm not aware of)

 

Anandtech posted of the ac Wifi in the new iMac which has a 3x3 Antenna.

AnandTech | 21.5-inch iMac (Late 2013) Review: Iris Pro Driving an Accurate Display

Excerpts from the Article

"Peak UDP performance is 829.8Mbps. Running the same test using TCP drops performance down to 553Mbps. What about actual file copy performance? I saw peak performance as high as 720Mbps, but average file copy speed over my network setup was ~500Mbps."

However, this is also stated "Connected to Apple’s new 802.11ac Airport Extreme I was able to negotiate the maximum link rate of 1300Mbps. I will say that maintaining the full speed connection was quite tricky and required very close proximity to the AP, and that the AP was located physically higher than the iMac."

The iMac was tested in an ideal situation and got an average file copy speed of ~500MBps or ~60 Megabytes per second. It'll probably be quite a bit lower on a laptop.

 

Thanks for the responses everyone. The reason I asked is because keeping all of my data on a centralized NAS/file server is impractical with 802.11n - it's great for the odd PDF or Word document, but any time I need to grab something of a substantial size (e.g. a software installer or an ISO image) the laptop needs to be plugged in to wired Ethernet, unless if it's one of those situations where I don't mind waiting for over an hour.

I guess that 802.11ac is still immature at this point...

 

I'm pretty much in the same situation as you are- also Wi-Fi to NAS situation. While 802.11ac seems to be a viable solution it's too expensive at this point (price-tags Asus puts on its SOHO routers belong on professional routers) and we still need a three stream internal Wi-Fi card to match what routers can do.