Like the title, how do access points claim speeds of over a gigabit when they themselves are limited with a gigabit ethernet supply?
In: Engineering
That’s the trick, they don’t!
Enterprise APs capable of faster than 1GB/s have multi gig ports that can handle speeds faster than 1 GB/s
But for a home router you’ll never achieve those speeds unless it’s device to device via wifi and even then unlikely.
So here’s the thing.
Those types of APs are doing MUMIMO (multi user multiple in multiple out) basically they are multiplexing the WiFi traffic to serve more clients at once.
In theory you should be able to do a layer2 transfer at the speed the router advertises. (Like if two machines are associated with the same AP doing a transfer between each other, and assuming both client machines support the speeds)
In enterprise networking, we have 2.5gig Ethernet if you want it (it’s still pretty expensive per-port)
So in reality, you could have a ax2000 ap connected to a multi gig Ethernet port with 10gig uplinks on a 10g circuit, and you would actually see those types of transfer rates especially if you’re pulling stuff down from CDNs
Those speeds do not necessarily mean that they alone can fully use all that speed, but that they can be part of a network that runs at that speed. All communication that happens on that channel uses time on that channel, so by communicating faster on the wireless than on your ethernet line, you leave some time for other devices to do their own communication. Or even just for communication in the other direction: on ethernet, both sides can talk at the same time, on wifi, they need to take turns.
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