Explain 802.11ac speeds to me

[JMB1911]

On an individual device level, say the latest smartphone would I notice any speed difference between an AC1900 and AC5200 router or does that higher number only mater if I'm going to have a lot of wireless devices running at the same time?

All of my "critical" stuff(desktop, roku, file server) is hardwired; only my phone, tablet, and laptop(when not docked) would be using wifi.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Short answer: No.

Long answer: You would likely never use your phone in such a way as to be able to take advantage of the extra speed. Unless you are transferring large files over the local network (streaming doesn't count), you likely won't see any additional benefit. Depending on your internet connection, you may not even see any benefit to the AC1900 speeds.

 

[JackMDS]

Short answer: No

To add to it look at the following page, it rates the Speed of the 5GHZ Down link from the Wireless Router to the client. I.e., what creates the level of the "Holy Bars".

Among the top Ten there is more 1900 the 5300.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/bar/113-5-ghz-dn-c

While the price of the Top Five varies from $ 178 to $360 almost 100%

The speed varies withing 10% from 246 266.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Without the proper adapter you'll never see max transfer speeds. In Small Net Builder's review of the Asus RT-AC5300 router, they used a second router (Asus RT-88U) to test the 4-stream performance because there are no quad-band wireless adapters.

ASUS supplied two RT-AC5300's so 4x4 thoughput could be tested. But the AC5300 doesn't support wireless bridging, so I had to use an RT-AC88U as the bridge partner.

In conclusion, they had this to say:

Perhaps Wi-Fi router makers have finally jumped the shark with this latest class of "kitchen sink" routers and their too-big-to-be-believed numbers on the box. The 1x1 and 2x2 devices most of us have get no benefit from the two extra transmit / receive chains, no benefit from Broadcom's "Nitro-QAM" non-standard modulation and no benefit from the MU-MIMO that even ASUS admits won't be properly baked until sometime this summer. And unless you have a lot of dual-band devices in simultaneous use, you'll get no benefit from the second 5 GHz radio, either.

 

[JackMDS]

In other words the Thingies above AC 1900 are basically Marketing Ploy rather then being useful innovation in Wireless technology.

 

[teejee]

No smartphone today can make use of more than AC1200. That is 867 Gbit link speed on 5Ghz band, and gives around 500 Mbit actual speed in perfect circumstances


And some general info about different AC speeds is found here:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/basics/wireless-basics/32175-how-fast-can-your-wi-fi-go