HSIC

I promise this is the last thing I'll write about 802.11ac today, but it is very relevant to our smartphone and tablet coverage. If you've followed any of our reviews in the mobile space you'll notice that there seems to be a bit of a glass ceiling in terms of WiFi performance on smartphones and tablets: We have yet to see a device that can download consistently at more than 36Mbps. For most smartphones/tablets this isn't alarming as they only support 2.4GHz 802.11n and a single spatial stream, resulting in a maximum interface speed of 72Mbps. Factor in loss and overhead and you're left with about half that as real world performance. It turns out, as you'd expect, that there's another bottleneck...