Abstract—Recently beamforming WiFi access points (APs)
have been commercially available from multiple vendors. The
promise of beamforming APs is the enhanced range and data
transmission rate, albeit at a premium price for the AP which
can be an order of magnitude more expensive than regular
omnidirectional APs. In this work, through live measurements,
we study the throughput performance of beamforming APs and
compare it with that of regular omnidirectional APs. We consider
two systems with multiple WiFi clients and: 1) a single expensive
beamforming AP, and 2) multiple low-cost omnidirectional APs.
We find that while in some situations the beamforming AP
outperforms multiple regular APs when downloading data, in
other scenarios typical of home and office use, multiple regular
APs results in higher throughput and service quality. Moreover,
multiple regular APs always outperforms the beamforming AP
when uploading data.