UNTIL recently, you had to lay category 6 ethernet cable to achieve lightning gigabit speeds across a home network.
The new 802.11ac standard for home WiFi aims to offer gigabit speeds across your home network wirelessly without cabling.
How an 802.11 AC router or modem/router does this is a complex issue.
Increasing the radio frequency bandwidth, and using multiple antennas that stream simultaneously from both the router and receiving device is part of the answer.
That's a bit like widening a major highway and adding several new lanes of traffic to increase throughput.
Here we are talking about the internal data streaming speeds you achieve within your home network when you, say, stream video from a home computer to your tablet device.
That's much faster than the internet connection speeds where you upload and download data between the internet and your home router.
Internet speed depends on whether you have ADSL2, a cable router or the NBN.
The first chipset for the ac standard was released in 2011, and the technical specification of the new ac standard is still in draft phase.
Nevertheless manufacturers have shown they are confident that the standard will not change by releasing ac modem/routers on to the consumer market that comply with the draft.
Netgear has been early to release an 802.11ac compliant modem/router on to the market and is still one of a small handful of companies to do so. D-Link, Buffalo, Belkin and Asus are others.
While in theory delivering gigabit speeds, the AC routers realistically offer up to 500 megabits per second for a single connection, about five times the theoretical maximum speed across the National Broadband Network.
The usual limiting factors such as the number of connections to the router, interference from white goods or other routers in apartment blocks, and the WiFi antenna setup on the connected laptop or tablet will determine the real streaming speeds.
In the end, manufacturers are expecting consumers will start buying ac routers this year in droves, even though there are very, very few devices with ac compatible radios.
But the ac standard does open the possibility of building entire WiFi-based home networks that offer efficient high-definition video streaming and data transfers using relatively little ethernet cable.
