George Ou asks: why no suits over inflated wireless network claims? Ou often asks the hard questions in this industry, and his latest ZDNet column wonders how a claim of 600% performance improvement that's really 60% in net throughput goes unchallenged when Apple has to pony up to solve old battery woes.
He's right that vendors try as hard as possible to inflate numbers. Broadcom pushed 54G as a label to imply 54 Mpbs without stating it. Atheros raised the ante with Turbo 108. Broadcom hit them with their "125" technology that doesn't state it runs at 125 Mbps. It's all about symbol rate, not the data you can push through.
The 600% claim improvement combines range with speed: you can get much higher speeds with early proprietary MIMO gear on both ends of a connection than at the same distance with 802.11g.