Note that both and TxBF are often referred to loosely as "beamforming," since many in the industry consider the term to mean generically "shaping radio energy in space to focus on the target recipient." There are fundamental differences in how these two technologies operate; however, yielding very significant differences in the performance improvements they can deliver in the real world.

Transmit beamforming allows an access point to concentrate energy in the direction of a particular client using signal processing techniques (phasing or timing the signals differently) at the baseband chipset. Explicit client feedback is required for APs to determine the correct phasing for each client.

While a promising potential addition to the RF toolkit, in reality, TxBF is subject to a number of constraints and disadvantages:

* No client support. This is a complete show-stopper. To achieve any real performance gains with TxBF in Wi-Fi, clients must support the standard that provides explicit feedback to the AP about how to do beamforming effectively for each client. This feature has zero support in the market today and none on the way in the foreseeable future.