Support for up to eight spatial streams (vs.Optional 160В MHz and mandatory 80В MHz channel bandwidth for stations cf.

New technologies introduced with 802.11ac include the following: 6.1 Commercial routers and access points.It meant Wave 2 products would have higher bandwidth and capacity than Wave 1 products. Subsequently in 2016, Wi-Fi Alliance introduced the Wave 2 certification, which includes additional features like MU-MIMO (down-link only), 160В MHz channel width support, support for more 5В GHz channels, and four spatial streams (with four antennas compared to three in Wave 1 and 802.11n, and eight in IEEE's 802.11ax specification). From mid-2013, the alliance started certifying Wave 1 802.11ac products shipped by manufacturers, based on the IEEE 802.11ac Draft 3.0 (the IEEE standard was not finalized until later that year). The Wi-Fi Alliance separated the introduction of ac wireless products into two phases ('waves'), named 'Wave 1' and 'Wave 2'. This is accomplished by extending the air-interface concepts embraced by 802.11n: wider RF bandwidth (up to 160В MHz), more MIMO spatial streams (up to eight), downlink multi-user MIMO (up to four clients), and high-density modulation (up to 256-QAM). The specification has multi-station throughput of at least 1.1 gigabit per second (1.1 Gbit/s) and single-link throughput of at least 500 megabits per second (0.5 Gbit/s). The standard has been retroactively labelled as Wi-Fi 5 by Wi-Fi Alliance. IEEE 802.11ac-2013 or 802.11ac is a wireless networking standard in the IEEE 802.11 set of protocols (which is part of the Wi-Fi networking family), providing high-throughput wireless local area networks (WLANs) on the 5В GHz band. *: (Wi-Fi 0, 1, 2, 3, are unbranded common usage.

Wireless networking standard in the 802.11 family Wi-Fi Generations

Broadcom bcm4352hmb 801.11ac 2x2