[t0mas88]

These theoretical data rates for WiFi are getting out of hand. The numbers have become completely useless to everyone, because they have no correlation to actual network speed.

It's like presenting the aggregated speed of all switch ports in an ethernet switch, without telling you how many ports there are or what the internal switching speed maximum is. "Here! Buy this 44gbit switch!" and then connect your equipment to find out the fastest link speed you'll get is 1gbps.

[MichaelZuo]

Theoretical limits always assume an unlimited budget for the antennas. Getting to within 2/3 of this figure is quite feasible for someone with a truly unlimited budget.

A better comparison would be the limits for a single strand of fiber optic cable.

[t0mas88]

Yes and even worse they now start to add the theoretical maximum of several streams together to get an even bigger number that makes even less sense.

For example Ubiquiti lists their Unifi U6+ at 1.2gbit and the U6 Pro at 4.8gbit. But the speed these two products will achieve in a home or small office is exactly the same. The Pro has some more range (bigger antennas), but both will get you about 700mbit in ideal reception no interference conditions because they're based on the same WiFi 6 standard.

Edit: And they know it, both products have a 1gbit physical port that is enough to serve "4.8 gbit wifi"

[neilalexander]

The reason the U6-Pro is listed as 4.8Gbit and the U6+ is listed as 1.2Gbit is because the 6+ only supports 2x2 MIMO on 5GHz, whereas the Pro supports 4x4 MIMO.

Most client devices won't go above 2x2 MIMO and many won't support above channel widths greater than 80MHz on 5GHz so your chance of saturating the 1Gbit uplink port is unlikely anyway.