You may well have never heard of Beamforming and MU-MIMO before, but these two Wifi technologies are now making their way into the everyday home routers we all use to connect our devices to the internet. Now – before you beam with delight (sorry) – this is actually good news, especially if you’ve had problems with poor connectivity in your home in the past.

BEAMFORMING: LEVEL-UP YOUR WIFI

Beamforming isn’t a brand new technology – it was actually an optional feature in the older 802.11n WiFi protocols, but was never properly standardised by the IEEE (the people behind WiFi standards and these not exactly intuitive naming conventions). In practice, this meant that your router might implement beamforming in one way and your laptop or phone in another, with the end result being it not working at all. Brilliant, eh? Beamforming is, however, fully implemented in 802.11ac.

SO, WHAT DOES IT DO, AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

Beamforming makes the WiFi radios in your equipment ‘smarter’ by including location information. The router can then alter its power and phase to essentially ‘target’ the device – resulting in faster and more efficient signals.

There are two types of beamforming – explicit and implicit. Explicit beamforming is when both the router and client device support the technology – the full-fat version. Most devices released within the last two years or so are fully beamforming capable, e.g., your favourite fruity iDevices.

Fear not though if your equipment is a little older than this, as implicit beamforming can still improve your WiFi experience. Working in this mode, the router will use its own measurements to make a ‘best-guess’ for targeting the signal.

MU-MIMO: MULTITASKING WIFI

Beamforming also enables a much greater enhancement to the WiFi protocols – the tongue-twisting Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) is a standardised method for talking to multiple clients simultaneously. This frees up a significant amount of bandwidth for clients, as they are no longer restricted to waiting in line to communicate one-at-a-time with the router.

Essentially, this improves the efficiency of WiFi, as the router is able to listen to your phone, laptop, tablet, fridge, heating etc., shouting out their data streams all at once.

Beamforming and MU-MIMO are already in use in state-of-the-art public WiFi installations, but everyone wants faster and better connectivity in the home too, and these technologies go some serious distance towards that goal.

If you don’t already have an 802.11ac beamforming capable wireless router, it’s definitely time to think seriously about upgrading.