Multiband (b/g/n) wireless on one card - what speed?

When using 2.4 GHz b/g/n mode and one client from each band is attached to the AP what will happen?

    1. B clients operate at B speed, G clients operate at G speed and N clients operate at N speed
  1. B speed for all three clients

My guess is that if a B client is present it will cause the whole AP to drop to B speeds. Am I right?

Thanks

It would actually be 1), except that it will be somewhat slower than if there were no B or G clients, as the AP has to transmit B and G compatible frames to tell those clients its busy.

Whoa, great news!

I guess this information came out officially from Mikrotik but I could not find it on any Wiki or documentation.

I believe you, but where did you get this information?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11

You can look through there and linked articles. In particular, it contains the statement: “802.11g hardware is fully backwards compatible with 802.11b hardware and therefore is encumbered with legacy issues that reduce throughput when compared to 802.11a by ~21%.”

Somewhere there is an article that went into more detail about how backwards compatibility works. (I’m pretty sure in the case of 802.11g, that that ~21% penalty goes away when everything is set to G-only. N has similar considerations.)

Would be nice if there was a G/N option. 802.11b can go to hell.

I too wish there was such an option in RouterOS.

So turn off the 802.11b data rates. If you’re not offering them, 802.11b clients cannot associate.

Well that was easier than I thought. Thank you.