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no 802.11ac in a smartphone....does it matter?

R

Raikonnen

Member
Hi folks,

I'm in need of a new cell phone and am looking very hard at the Moto G5 plus - excellent price point.
My main hesitation is a lack of 802.11ac. My 4 year old S4 has it so I thought it strange for a new phone not to have it also.

I can't find anything about it in an reviews they just mention it doesn't have 'ac' but they don't talk about what that means for wifi speeds etc.

Thoughts? 🙂
 
First, it depends if you have a congested n network situation. Second, unless you transfer a huge amount of data you won't see much, if any difference. My S7 seems to like uploading around 50MB/sec which is limited by my SD card speed anyways (megabytes, not megabits).

Use it mainly for 4K recordings which take a while...
 
For the most part no, but occasionally yes.

Unless you have a very fast home internet connection (we're talking hundreds of megabits per second), it won't normally matter much. The main advantage 802.11ac would provide is performance at the fringe of the network. 300Mbps on 802.11n is doable when you're in the same room, for example, but you may only get a fraction of that in a bedroom upstairs.

But if you're in an apartment, or you're not downloading a lot while you're on the opposite end of your home? Don't worry about it. You want an overall good phone first... fast WiFi is just a nice bonus.
 
Commodus said:
For the most part no, but occasionally yes.

Unless you have a very fast home internet connection (we're talking hundreds of megabits per second), it won't normally matter much. The main advantage 802.11ac would provide is performance at the fringe of the network. 300Mbps on 802.11n is doable when you're in the same room, for example, but you may only get a fraction of that in a bedroom upstairs.
Click to expand...

Trust me, once you have gigabit Internet, no Wi-Fi is fast enough. Top I've ever seen on even ac is 350mbps.

But for a phone it doesn't really matter. It wouldn't make or break my phone decisions.
 
Great, thanks for the info everyone! I mostly want to make sure it doesn't Eff up Netfix streaming etc. I don't download anything at all mostly....just Youtube and Netflix and I don't want a new phone to be slower than my S4! It sounds like there will be no difference....
 
With your current phone, connect to your Wireless N network and see how it works for you (temporarily disable AC network if necessary). If it works fine, the Moto G5 plus will work just fine also.
 
Dulanic said:
Trust me, once you have gigabit Internet, no Wi-Fi is fast enough. Top I've ever seen on even ac is 350mbps.

But for a phone it doesn't really matter. It wouldn't make or break my phone decisions.
Click to expand...

I get over 65 MB/s between my computer and NAS over 802.11ac which is ~550 Mb/s. It also depends on the quality of the wireless card and antenna. You probably wouldn't see that on a phone with a small integrated antenna even if it had 802.11ac.
 
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