[gruez]

>I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g.

You'd probably be well served by 802.11n right now. Take a typical setup of 802.11n with 2x2 MIMO: theoretical speeds would be 300Mb/s. Halve that for "real world" performance, and you have speeds of 150Mb/s. That's more than enough for multiple streams of 4k netflix. Looking around it looks like most 802.11n adapters of the day (I checked 2011, the spec was released in 2009) only support 2.4ghz, so spectrum congestion might be an issue in high density areas, if we halve the speed again to account for this, we get 75Mb/s, which might be slower than your internet access, but is still otherwise usable.

Based on this, I'm thinking the prudent strategy is to upgrade every other wifi generation.

[lmns]

802.11n with 5 GHz is okayish, but using 2.4 GHz can be brutal. It's not just the bandwidth, the whole frequency band is just bad. My latency regularly goes through the roof and voice calls are noticeably worse than with 5 GHz wifi.

802.11ac mandates 5 GHz, so it's a reasonable baseline. I don't even care if it's SISO, MIMO or whatever as long as I don't have to fall back to 2.4 GHz.