 7-13 A Wi-Fi access point. (Courtesy of Linksys) The increasing capabilities of Wi-Fi networks have resulted in greater dependence on wireless networks. This is particularly true in mobile environments such as hospitals, factories, and educational institutions where employees often do not have a fixed desk at which to send and receive data. In addition, staff members in www.TechnicalPDF.com organizations now assume that they can take advantage of wireless access for tablets and smartphones during meetings, at lunch, and wherever they are within their building or within their organization's campus. Multi-User MIMO-Improvements in MIMO Multi-User MIMO (MU MIMO) supports transmissions to more than one user device at a time. Without MU MIMO, transmissions are sent to different devices serially, one at a time. MU MIMO antennas operate at the 5GHz bands of spectrum that support gigabit data rates. MU MIMO equipped routers are referred to as Wave 2 or Wave 3 equipment. 802.11 ac (Wi-Fi 5) Gigabit Data Rates, Beamforming, and Bonding The 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard, now dubbed Wi-Fi 5 by the Wi-Fi Alliance supports bonding, Multi-User MIMO, and gigabit data rates. 802.11ac supports beamforming, the ability to focus a signal directly to the end-user device rather than transmitting wireless signals addressed to a particular device in all directions at once. Beamforming transmits separate streams to individual users within the same spectrum. This decreases congestion. 802.11ac achieves high data rates in part due to its modulation, the way bits are carried on the wireless streams. 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) carries many more bits by varying the amplitude, the height, of each wave in the data stream. Channel bonding enables high data rates by combining multiple streams into a single stream. However, bonding channels together results in fewer channels available to other devices in the network decreasing capacity to other devices in the Wi-Fi network. www.TechnicalPDF.com An extender is essentially a repeater. It "