I’m a network professional with a specialty in wireless.
Yeah, beam forming and mimo are the main reasons for antenna diversity. There’s also more radio chains in those units typically, and more radio chains can provide better speeds if you have client devices that can take advantage of the extra radio chains (both sides need to have the same, increased number of radio chains to see an increase).
The antennas are fairly small/thin pieces of wire that are not very long, so the antennas don’t need to look like that, but the quantity is useful.
As someone with a telecommunications background who’s taken apart some cheap routers that look like that: the only caveat I’ll add is that the antennas are only useful if they’re actually connected to anything. From a decently trustworthy brand you’re probably fine, but I’ve seen a few where only one or two of the antenna couplings were connected to anything internally.
Technically, it does provide better connection speeds by enabling the router to avoid channel hopping, so it can talk to multiple devices (or the same devices if it has multiple antennae) at the same time. This is part of the recent wifi6 and wifi7 standards so more and more devices will start to gain speeds using this technique
Realistically computers have at best 2 antennae and this is largely marketing wank.
Though if you have multiple devices all trying to connect to wifi, like even a phone for example, then a computer having two antenna that it can actually use 100% of the time still sounds valuable to me.
It does. Wifi uses MIMO (Multi-in, multi-out) to run multiple concurrent data streams over the same channel width, which overcomes individual channel bandwidth limitations (there’s only so much radio frequency space to go around). Each stream having its own antenna, and having larger antennas, gives stronger signal/noise ratios, less retransmitted packets, and overall better connections.
A lot of those high end “gaming” routers are often oversold though… MIMO improves throughput if you have an Internet link it can saturate; realistically even a midrange 2x2 802.11AC router will provide more wifi bandwidth than your internet does. And for gaming, they do nothing to improve latency no matter how many streams you run, as wifi’s inherent delay (5-15ms) is pretty much a fixed quantity due to its radio broadcast time-sharing nature. The meme is correct. A $6 ethernet cable beats any and all wifi routers and client adapters, and always will.
2x2 AC on 5ghz has an 867mbps max PHY throughput, which after a 50% derate for signal quality and overhead is still a very comfortable 400mbps… typical cable internet is around 100 to 500mbps with a lot of places offering “1gbps” that it never actually reaches, so it’s certainly sufficient for 90% of people.
If you have a very heavy multi user (6+ devices always on) household you may find some benefit from an AX 2x2 or 3x3 router just because it can handle congestion better.
It’s not all about the WAN speed. Having fast LAN speeds is always worth it.
This will help hugely with stuff like PC game streaming (from your PC to a tablet or TV for example), screen sharing to TV, file transfers over LAN, media servers, etc.
Six plus always-on devices is rookie numbers. I’m in the twenties, in a house with a handful of people.
And yes, the router I’m currently using is faster than all my wired devices over wifi, save for the two that pair some form of 2.5/10Gb ports. Also yes, my 1Gbps WAN hits about 900-ish on the downstream, with the ISP guaranteeing at least 800 as a legal requirement. I don’t know if other regions allow ISPs to sell connections that run at 50% of the advertised speed, but… yeah, no, that’s illegal here.
Honestly, full home coverage is the biggest issue I have. If this was a new house I would have wired it as a solution, but as it is, I only got the whole home fully connected with reliable speeds by spending a bunch of money in wireless networking gear.
Explanation: mostly younger roommates. Majority of bandwidth goes to just 21 personal machines, 4 MLO devices in particular, 1 of which uploads a fuck ton of cam stuff.
That said, most connections are idle. In particular there’s a chunky subnet of energy monitors with a low hum of usage.
I say “hell” because it takes 7 mesh nodes to reach everyone (while playing nice re: antenna strength in a congested building), maintaining security and privacy for everyone requires planning, and the second anything goes wrong everyone loses their minds.
I mean, once you factor in a phone, a computer, probably some gaming device running updates in the background, you’re thinking at least three devices per person, plus whatever tablets, smart TVs, printers and IoT garbage you have lying around the house. And if you live on an apartment you’re trying to service all of that alongside a bunch of other people trying to do the same.
Honestly, I struggled a lot to get a solid, cost effective mesh to solve the issue. I ended up going back to brute forcing it with a chonker of a router. No idea if that impacts my neighbours and, frankly, at this point it’s every bubble of electromagnetic real estate for themselves.
It’s honestly crazy how much networking you have to do at home these days, particularly if you work from home or throw in a NAS into the mix. I have no idea how the normies manage. Maybe they pay somebody to set it up?
I’ve wondered the same. Pretty sure they just lean on the ISP equipment offerings and outsource the rest to the cloud. Critically, I envision plug and play users who don’t give a shit about security or privacy, and that simplifies a lot.
Honestly if you take that setup from the ISP (which I think is often free and now usually includes a docsis 3.x with at least one repeater, installed) then just bump the default encryption and add a VPN, I wouldn’t say it’s a bad way to go at all, mainly because when there’s any issue it’s on the ISP to fix it.
It won’t be bleeding edge and you won’t be able to do any directed networking fanciness without your own gear, but the not my problem perk is nothing to sneeze at.
And yeah mesh is a headache. It’s all wired backhaul (sfp+ and copper) but nodes regularly fall out of sync and the mesh doesn’t heal properly. Main reason I kept coming back was the benefit of co-channel stacking, which makes your signal footprint small but really deep so neighboring routers move over.
Yeah the meme is just trying to be superior edgy. We live in an old duplex and no, my landlord won’t let me run networking through the walls and ceiling. I tried cabled network over electricity sockets and it’s worse than a good wireless connection.
You won’t ever get anywhere close to that though on 2x2 AC.
Where do you live where 1 Gbit/s is much lower than 1 GBit/s? When I had 1 GBit/s, I got around 800-950 Mbit/s. When I had 2 Gbit/s I got around 1,7-2,5 Gbit/s
To be more precise it’s not each stream having it’s own antenna, you combine the signals from all antennas and then “spatially filter” it into separate streams, but the number of concurrent streams is limited by the minimum of the number of antennas at both ends of the connection, if your device has only one antenna and your access point has eight you can only have one data stream.
Does this ridiculous number of antennas even do anything or is it just marketing wank?
I’m a network professional with a specialty in wireless.
Yeah, beam forming and mimo are the main reasons for antenna diversity. There’s also more radio chains in those units typically, and more radio chains can provide better speeds if you have client devices that can take advantage of the extra radio chains (both sides need to have the same, increased number of radio chains to see an increase).
The antennas are fairly small/thin pieces of wire that are not very long, so the antennas don’t need to look like that, but the quantity is useful.
As someone with a telecommunications background who’s taken apart some cheap routers that look like that: the only caveat I’ll add is that the antennas are only useful if they’re actually connected to anything. From a decently trustworthy brand you’re probably fine, but I’ve seen a few where only one or two of the antenna couplings were connected to anything internally.
Technically, it does provide better connection speeds by enabling the router to avoid channel hopping, so it can talk to multiple devices (or the same devices if it has multiple antennae) at the same time. This is part of the recent wifi6 and wifi7 standards so more and more devices will start to gain speeds using this technique
Realistically computers have at best 2 antennae and this is largely marketing wank.
Lookup “phased array” and “beam forming”
Though if you have multiple devices all trying to connect to wifi, like even a phone for example, then a computer having two antenna that it can actually use 100% of the time still sounds valuable to me.
Lord Sauron would like a word.
It does. Wifi uses MIMO (Multi-in, multi-out) to run multiple concurrent data streams over the same channel width, which overcomes individual channel bandwidth limitations (there’s only so much radio frequency space to go around). Each stream having its own antenna, and having larger antennas, gives stronger signal/noise ratios, less retransmitted packets, and overall better connections.
A lot of those high end “gaming” routers are often oversold though… MIMO improves throughput if you have an Internet link it can saturate; realistically even a midrange 2x2 802.11AC router will provide more wifi bandwidth than your internet does. And for gaming, they do nothing to improve latency no matter how many streams you run, as wifi’s inherent delay (5-15ms) is pretty much a fixed quantity due to its radio broadcast time-sharing nature. The meme is correct. A $6 ethernet cable beats any and all wifi routers and client adapters, and always will.
What fast of a WAN connection are you talking about?
I can’t see how a midrange 802.11AC AP could suffice for a decent WAN connection. IMO you need at least 802.11ax
What do you define as a “decent” WAN connection?
2x2 AC on 5ghz has an 867mbps max PHY throughput, which after a 50% derate for signal quality and overhead is still a very comfortable 400mbps… typical cable internet is around 100 to 500mbps with a lot of places offering “1gbps” that it never actually reaches, so it’s certainly sufficient for 90% of people.
If you have a very heavy multi user (6+ devices always on) household you may find some benefit from an AX 2x2 or 3x3 router just because it can handle congestion better.
It’s not all about the WAN speed. Having fast LAN speeds is always worth it.
This will help hugely with stuff like PC game streaming (from your PC to a tablet or TV for example), screen sharing to TV, file transfers over LAN, media servers, etc.
Six plus always-on devices is rookie numbers. I’m in the twenties, in a house with a handful of people.
And yes, the router I’m currently using is faster than all my wired devices over wifi, save for the two that pair some form of 2.5/10Gb ports. Also yes, my 1Gbps WAN hits about 900-ish on the downstream, with the ISP guaranteeing at least 800 as a legal requirement. I don’t know if other regions allow ISPs to sell connections that run at 50% of the advertised speed, but… yeah, no, that’s illegal here.
Honestly, full home coverage is the biggest issue I have. If this was a new house I would have wired it as a solution, but as it is, I only got the whole home fully connected with reliable speeds by spending a bunch of money in wireless networking gear.
Well since the ruler’s out, 133 here. It’s hell.
Explanation: mostly younger roommates. Majority of bandwidth goes to just 21 personal machines, 4 MLO devices in particular, 1 of which uploads a fuck ton of cam stuff.
That said, most connections are idle. In particular there’s a chunky subnet of energy monitors with a low hum of usage.
I say “hell” because it takes 7 mesh nodes to reach everyone (while playing nice re: antenna strength in a congested building), maintaining security and privacy for everyone requires planning, and the second anything goes wrong everyone loses their minds.
Woof, yeah, now you’re talking.
I mean, once you factor in a phone, a computer, probably some gaming device running updates in the background, you’re thinking at least three devices per person, plus whatever tablets, smart TVs, printers and IoT garbage you have lying around the house. And if you live on an apartment you’re trying to service all of that alongside a bunch of other people trying to do the same.
Honestly, I struggled a lot to get a solid, cost effective mesh to solve the issue. I ended up going back to brute forcing it with a chonker of a router. No idea if that impacts my neighbours and, frankly, at this point it’s every bubble of electromagnetic real estate for themselves.
It’s honestly crazy how much networking you have to do at home these days, particularly if you work from home or throw in a NAS into the mix. I have no idea how the normies manage. Maybe they pay somebody to set it up?
I’ve wondered the same. Pretty sure they just lean on the ISP equipment offerings and outsource the rest to the cloud. Critically, I envision plug and play users who don’t give a shit about security or privacy, and that simplifies a lot.
Honestly if you take that setup from the ISP (which I think is often free and now usually includes a docsis 3.x with at least one repeater, installed) then just bump the default encryption and add a VPN, I wouldn’t say it’s a bad way to go at all, mainly because when there’s any issue it’s on the ISP to fix it.
It won’t be bleeding edge and you won’t be able to do any directed networking fanciness without your own gear, but the not my problem perk is nothing to sneeze at.
And yeah mesh is a headache. It’s all wired backhaul (sfp+ and copper) but nodes regularly fall out of sync and the mesh doesn’t heal properly. Main reason I kept coming back was the benefit of co-channel stacking, which makes your signal footprint small but really deep so neighboring routers move over.
Yeah the meme is just trying to be superior edgy. We live in an old duplex and no, my landlord won’t let me run networking through the walls and ceiling. I tried cabled network over electricity sockets and it’s worse than a good wireless connection.
You won’t ever get anywhere close to that though on 2x2 AC.
Where do you live where 1 Gbit/s is much lower than 1 GBit/s? When I had 1 GBit/s, I got around 800-950 Mbit/s. When I had 2 Gbit/s I got around 1,7-2,5 Gbit/s
To be more precise it’s not each stream having it’s own antenna, you combine the signals from all antennas and then “spatially filter” it into separate streams, but the number of concurrent streams is limited by the minimum of the number of antennas at both ends of the connection, if your device has only one antenna and your access point has eight you can only have one data stream.
Great answer. Thank you
I believe it’s for beam forming which can be used to improve signal strength in a specific direction.
Some of them are marketing wank, some of them have MIMO channels that need multiple antennas to support independent bands with multiple devices.
1 MIMO channel = 2 antennas, so this router could theoretically have 4 devices communicating bilaterally without interrupting each other.