@brozsa For an AC1200 router don't expect more than 450-500 Mbps in 5GHz WiFi ac. That's pretty much the usual limit.

Wireless speed also depends on the receiver, if it supports MIMO and beamforming for instance and how many MIMO antennas are available. Of course, the environment conditions impact a lot too, it's not the same a isolated country house than a crowded building in a city center full of networks.

Currently the only practical way of getting a full wireless 1Gbps is getting WiFi 6 devices (both access point and end device)

thanks - can you pls further specify why I shouldn't expect more?

as mentioned environment factors shouldn't impact the speed and my laptop's network adapter is certainly capable of handling more...

just curious really, why does the manufacturer advertise the 5ghz speed to cap at 867mbps if in reality it will not be over 400 even in case of the most ideal conditions. and to make it worse, they hardly mention it anywhere on their website or product manual - it's completely misleading towards the customer.

@brozsa The advertised speed is the "raw" wireless link speed, and that link is shared between client and router.

Both devices can't "talk" at the same time because 802.11 is half duplex. The way WiFi works is send a small chunk of data - wait for a response (acknowledgement, repeat, etc.) - receive response - send more data and so on. So, if the shared link is 867Mbps, when it's time to send data it sends it at 867Mbps, but part of the time it is waiting or receiving, so the overall average transmission speed is quite lower.

Also, WiFi protocols (plus the rest of the stack like IP and TCP) add quite a lot of overhead to the data to ensure data integrity.

All that without counting the environment that would make the link less reliable and hence slower.