 A lot of questions come up about Wi-Fi performance and speed, and we know that what's on the box versus what you get can vary a lot, especially when it comes to Wi-Fi. And of course, from a marketing standpoint, we want to put the fastest potential that any device will offer, versus the reality of what that device will offer. Obviously, there can be some discrepancies. Wi-Fi is subject to a lot of discrepancies. And I wanted to cover a couple things real quick about Wi-Fi, and I'm using a unified device, but this applies to other devices as well. And that comes to the channel width scenarios. And probably you're asking, well, don't I just set it to the widest channel width possible so I get the most speed possible, and that'll make all my fast problems go away, and it's only for some legacy reason that they don't have all the channels? No. Unfortunately, it's a little bit more complicated than that. I won't read you the article, but I found this clever right up from Seven Signals, the Wi-Fi performance company. I actually hadn't heard of them before I started Googling this so I could get a more concise answer. But it's what nobody's telling you about 80 megahertz and 160 megahertz channel bonding. Now to go back a little bit of a history, these are your channels, and they have a few graphs on here to show you the different channel options. So this is your 20, your 40, and your 80, which you're actually doing because the Wi-Fi is split up into 20 megahertz slices, which equates to being a channel. You bond those channels together to create more speed. Makes sense. The problem is because of the way Wi-Fi is as a standard, it only allows for so many channels. So when you start using more of these channels, and as in bonding them together, you have less channel options. So for example, if there's Wi-Fi interference in one of those channels, you would simply move to another channel. When you bond the channels together, that becomes more difficult because there's less room to maneuver if there's some type of interference in between. Now this may not at all apply to your house. So if you're in a small area, single Wi-Fi deployment, there's not any real interference because it's just you. You have a clear line of sight of the device. So you're going to get the max performance out of there and having the full 80 should be perfectly fine for you. But if you have a neighbor on the other side of the wall with their 5 gigahertz pushing at the same channel, well, now you have that interference problem. And if you have the channels bonded, but some of the channels are being knocked out by interference, you're going to get very low performance. This is why Wi-Fi performance is so tricky. It's also tricky because, for example, I have my phone pulled up here so you can see it has good Wi-Fi performance. You can see it's connected at a Wi-Fi speed of 866. We have it at the full channel width of 80 megahertz. But if any other Wi-Fi is turned on in the office, it will still connect at that speed, but the interference will cause it to have slower overall performance. The other thing you're going to note, so the phone is actually right here. I got it just out of the camera. Just by me holding the phone, you can see it went down. And then by me moving the phone to my pocket, just that far distance. So it's just out of the camera, sitting down further, we lose that much more signal. And that is the tricky part of Wi-Fi performance. Now Unify also has a tool here to show your RF environment. So here is the 2G environment versus the 5G environment. And this is what I'm talking about with the channels. So here's all the different channel options, but when you start bonding them, here's the channel options for 40, and here's the channel options for 80. So there's just many fewer channels because you're bonding all these channels together. That's why this chart looks like this. Now I'm not going to run a scan right now. I did earlier and you can do this on a lot of the Unify, newer Unify devices so you can look through the tool and figure out what's interfering. And if you want, you can just force the channel in because you know what the channel is at an adjacent access point. Let's do a couple tests real quick here and show the speed difference between the different channel options. So right here is the radios. We have them at the 2.4, which we're not using, but I did set it to 40. And then we have here set at 80, and we're connected right now at the 5 GHz. We're going to use iPerf on my phone and iPerf on my computer. So I have iPerf set up and listening. And Magic iPerf is a free tool that you can get in the Android Store. Maybe it's for iPhone as well. I don't know. We'll go ahead and do a speed test here. And I have the phone sitting on a stand with my hands off of it so I can get the most consistent numbers possible. So about 272. We'll run this again. Now to highlight what a difference holding the phone makes, now I'm going to just hold the phone and do the same test. And you can see how much it has dropped. And all's I'm doing is holding it in my hand. I'm putting both hands on it because I don't know where the, I think the antenna is at the top on the Android. So actually I'll just hold it at the top and do one more test. Yeah, the antenna is at the top. So putting my hand over the antenna, it's slower. I put it at the bottom and it got that much faster. So these little tiny differences is why it's so hard to pinpoint Wi-Fi. So I'm going to put it back in the stand here where we know we were getting about 277 without my hands on it. And we're going to switch the width of the channel back down. So now we're not going to bond the channels anymore. Apply and we'll see it provisioning. It takes a second here. My phone will actually drop and reconnect. It provisions really fast when you change the bonding of the channels. And the phone goes in and out really quick when this happens. All right, it's reconnected. And we'll go ahead and run the test again. So we're seeing about 122 versus the 272 we were getting before. So it's like 127 now without the channels bonded. So one more test. We'll do it in my hand again and hold it like this. And you can see it coming all the way down. Not quite as much, but it is dropping down to 74, depending on where I move my hand here. So if I move it, make sure it's right over it. Hit it again. Yeah, it is moving it that little bit closer to me. And away you go, you can see how much we lost in there. So the lost is more of a percentage because you still are going to lose. So that type of interference, as in my hand in a way, doesn't really affect the channel bonding. Channel bondings only really affect it by other Wi-Fi devices in that channel range of the bonded channels. So hopefully this clears that up. This is a question people always want to know, why isn't it set that way? Or should I set it that way? Or what is the trade off for loss? So short answer is, as long as you don't have it in your appearance, and there's no other APs in there, for example, if you're at your home, you have line of sight because your Wi-Fi is really close to where your devices are, and you need that maximum power for whatever reason, then you can go ahead and use the channel bonding, put them all together, and it should work perfectly fine. But if you're bouncing off a lot of things, you're in a high density area, or you're doing a commercial deployment with a lot of Wi-Fi units, you have to think and plan about where the position of those units are, and whether or not they will interfere with each other because that can happen too. And I'll leave you a link to this article. They have a few of them on this topic so you can dive deeper into it about the 256 QAM, Wave 2, and 802 11AC channel bonding in many more engineering details here. I thought this article was pretty cool. I guess that'll leave a link below. But hopefully that clears that up about the Wi-Fi performance. We may do some head-to-head testing with some other Wi-Fi devices, but I like to do this for a while to try to get some of the consumer ones. Maybe if someone will send me one of them, we'll head-to-head with them. But we have seen really, really wonderful performance out of the unified devices. Like I said, hopefully this clears that up and I'll leave links where you can use the tools that I use to do this testing. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up. Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details which you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback. 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