Data rates for every 802.11n, ac, ax and be MCS with up to four spatial streams. Pick a cell to see how its rate is calculated, or enter the link rate a device reports to find the MCS behind it.
Enter the rate a device shows (for example 866 or 1201 Mbps). Whole numbers match within 1 Mbps, because devices round differently.
Results appear here.
Data rate = data subcarriers × bits per subcarrier × coding rate × spatial streams ÷ (OFDM symbol time + guard interval). 802.11n and 802.11ac use a 3.2 µs symbol with a 0.8 µs or 0.4 µs (short) guard interval. 802.11ax and 802.11be use a 12.8 µs symbol with 0.8, 1.6 or 3.2 µs guard intervals and four times as many, more closely spaced subcarriers.
From 802.11ax on, a channel is divided into resource units (RUs) of 26 to 996 tones for OFDMA, and a full 20, 40, 80 or 160 MHz channel is a 242, 484, 996 or 2×996-tone RU. 802.11be adds 320 MHz (4×996 tones, 6 GHz only) and multi-RUs such as 484+242 that combine two or more RUs for one user.
802.11ac excludes a few combinations because their bits per OFDM symbol don't split evenly: MCS 9 at 20 MHz with 1, 2 or 4 streams, MCS 6 at 80 MHz with 3 streams, and MCS 9 at 160 MHz with 3 streams. 802.11ax allows 1024-QAM (MCS 10 and 11) only on RUs of 242 tones or more. In 802.11be, MCS 14 and 15 are single-stream only.
Both use BPSK with dual carrier modulation (DCM), which sends every bit twice on different subcarriers for extra range at half the rate. MCS 15 applies DCM to a single RU or multi-RU. MCS 14 (EHT-DUP) goes further and duplicates the signal across both halves of an 80, 160 or 320 MHz channel.
More than four spatial streams, 802.11ah (sub-1 GHz), 802.11n unequal modulation (MCS 33 to 76), and 802.11ax DCM variants of MCS 0, 1, 3 and 4. The rates are PHY rates: real throughput is lower because of protocol overhead, contention and retries.