[smashed]

> you could probably send a weaker signal from mobile devices and drown the air with signal from anything plugged into a wall socket.

How exactly is your mobile device going to ACK those received packets? The mobile device needs to transmit as loudly as the AP for its ack to be received.

Boosting the transmit power higher than your receiving device can transmit leads to very bad wifi links, where the mobile device is receiving a good signal but it's own messages are not received back.

[BenjiWiebe]

You can use different modulation rates to/from a device (this commonly happens). Lower modulation rates give you better SNR, letting your quiet client do slow weak ACKs to loud large chunks of data from the router.