How Beamforming Works?
In simplified terms, Beamforming Technology is all about focusing your Wi-Fi signal in a specific direction. Traditionally, when your router broadcasts a Wi-Fi signal, it broadcasts the data in all directions. With beamforming, the router determines where your device — laptop, smartphone, tablet, or whatever else — is located and projects a stronger signal in that specific direction. A single antenna broadcasting a wireless signal radiates that signal in all directions (unless it's blocked by some physical object). That's the nature of how electromagnetic waves work. But what if you wanted to focus that signal in a specific direction, to form a targeted beam of electromagnetic energy? One technique for doing this involves having multiple antennas in close proximity, all broadcasting the same signal at slightly different times. The overlapping waves will produce interference that in some areas is constructive (it makes the signal stronger) and in other areas is destructive (it makes the signal weaker, or undetectable). If executed correctly, this beamforming process can focus your signal where you want it to go.
Benefits of Beamforming
By focusing a signal in a specific direction, beamforming allows you to deliver higher signal quality to your receiver — which in practice means faster information transfer and fewer errors — without needing to boost broadcast power. That's basically the holy grail of wireless networking and the goal of most techniques for improving wireless communication. As an added benefit, because you aren't broadcasting your signal in directions where it's not needed, beamforming can reduce interference experienced by people trying to pick up other signals.
Beamforming began to appear in routers back in 2008, with the advent of the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. 802.11n was the first version of Wi-Fi to support multiple-input multiple-output, or MIMO, technology, which beamforming needs in order to send out multiple overlapping signals. Beamforming with 802.11n equipment never really took off, however, because the spec doesn't lay out how beamforming should be implemented. A few vendors put out proprietary implementations that required purchasing matching routers and wireless cards to work, and they were not popular. With the emergence of the 802.11ac standard in 2016, that all changed. There's now a set of specified beamforming techniques for Wi-Fi gear, and while 802.11ac routers aren't required by the specification to implement beamforming, if they do (and almost all on the market now do) they do so in a vendor-neutral and interoperable way. While some offerings might tout branded names, such as D-Link's AC Smart Beam, these are all implementations of the same standard. (The even newer 802.11ax standard continues to support ac-style beamforming.)
To date, local Wi-Fi networks are where the average person is most likely to encounter beamforming in the wild. But with the rollout of wide-area 5G networks now underway, that's about to change. 5G uses radio frequencies between 30 and 300 GHz, which can transmit data much more quickly but are also much more prone to interference and encounter more difficulty passing through physical objects. A host of technologies are required to overcome these problems, including smaller cells, massive MIMO — basically cramming tons of antennas onto 5G base stations — and, yes, beamforming. If 5G takes off in the way that vendors are counting on, the time will come soon enough when we'll all be using beamforming (behind the scenes) every day.
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