 Hey everybody, it's Tosses with RF Elements and today's episode of Inside Wireless we're going to be talking about throughput. Throughput is a number of bits per second in which a wireless or wired link can transfer data. Radio manufacturers for wireless hardware advertise their products by the ever-increasing physical rates they can achieve. Throughput and physical rates are not the same thing. So let's have a look at what each of these are. The figure manufacturers use to market their products is called physical rate. Physical rates are composed of the user's throughput and overhead data for error protection. Formatting of a single data frame can help us understand what part of a physical data rate is overhead and what throughput is relevant to the end user. Overhead data varies from standard to standard. For the 802.11 wireless networking protocol, overhead is comprised of random weight data slots, physical and MAC headers, and packet trailers at the end of each packet. In short, this is the data the AP and CPE need to exchange to facilitate successful communication between the two devices. As the 802.11 standard keeps developing, so is the composition of the basic data packet. Also, maintaining backwards compatibility is one of the main factors taken into account when features are being added to newer generations. The user's throughput is always a fraction of the physical rate. Thankfully, you don't have to study the documentation of the 802 standard to figure out what throughputs you can achieve. There are plenty of webpages which tell you exactly what throughputs you can expect based on the parameters and settings of your radio. It's important to understand that the data in such tables are the maximum possible throughput. Varying user distribution, weather conditions, or change of hardware in your RF link can change the throughput that you actually see. One should be very careful when addressing a user complaint about throughput and consider as many factors as needed. Oh, and one last thing. Users often confuse bits and bytes. One byte is 8 bits, so throughput is usually giving in bits per second and can be converted easily by dividing by 8. If you find our videos useful, like, leave a comment, or consider subscribing to our channel for more interesting videos.