All wireless is half duplex. N gives you faster speeds because it uses multiple streams. The radio still can only receive or transmit one session at a time to one client at a time.
You can't combine a 2.4 and a 5 Ghz radio for a single transmission.
This should help some...
The backward compatibility and speed capability of 802.11n come from its use of multiple antennas and a technology called Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO). MIMO, pronounced Mee-Moh, uses different antennas to send and receive, thus increasing throughput and accomplishing more of a full duplex operation.
MIMO comes in three types:
■ Precoding
■ Spatial multiplexing
■ Diversity coding
Precoding is a function that takes advantage of multiple antennas and the multipath issue that was discussed in Chapter 3, “WLAN RF Principles.” 802.11n uses transmit beamforming (TxBF), which is a technique that is used when more than one transmit antenna exists where the signal is coordinated and sent from each antenna so that the signal at the receiver is dramatically improved, even if it is far from the sender. This technique is something that you would use when the receiver has only a single antenna and is not moving. If the receiver is moving, then the reflection characteristics change, and the beamforming can no longer be coordinated. This coordination is called channel state information (CSI).
Spatial multiplexing takes a signal, splits it into several lower rate streams, and then sends each one out of different antennas. Each one of the lower rate streams are sent on the same frequency. The number of streams is limited to the lowest number of antennas on either the transmitter or the receiver. If an AP has four antennas and a client has two, you are
limited to two.
Just remember any speed you see advertised is actually the connection rate, and not the throughput rate.
