125 High Speed Mode - Interoperability

Interoperability

• These (and similar) proprietary extensions are incompatible across different wi-fi chips vendors. So to make wi-fi links work in 125 HSM mode, both sides should use chips from same vendor (e.g. Broadcom). In most real-world scenarios such modes are simply useless due to different chips used by different devices.
• Existence of several similar technologies with different branding and incompatible with each other causes massive consumer confusion.
• These technologies are marketed in such a way it is possible to see them as cheating and tricking consumers through technology branding. This type of network will never be able to reach 125 Mbit/s as real data throughput; 125 Mbit/s is the maximum data rate before accounting for overhead. This causes consumer frustration due to failed expectations. For instance, the average consumer would expect a 125 Mbit/s wireless link to outperform a standard 100 Mbit/s wired link while, in fact, 100 Mbit/s wired link will be much faster; a standard wired 100Mbit/s 100BaseT link is approximately three times faster than 125HSM in simplex mode (i.e. transmitting or receiving only) and six times faster than 125HSM in full-duplex mode (i.e. both transmitting and receiving data—which is typical during file transfers between 2 computer connected to the same hub). In other words, even under ideal conditions, 125 HSM mode may only deliver anywhere from a third to one sixth the data transfer speed of a standard 100 Mbit/s wired LAN link.