In recent years, routers with many antennas have appeared, generally we look at the number of antennae when externalHowever, when the routers incorporate internal antennas we do not pay special attention to them, but they are there. Many people believe that buying a wireless router with many antennas is betterand it will provide us with better speed on our devices, however, this is not always so, because it also depends on how many antennas the wireless clients have. Today we are going to explain if it is worth buying a router with many antennas or not.
How many antennas do top-of-the-range routers have?
High-end routers, whether «normal” either gaming routers, have up to 8 external antennas to provide wireless coverage, right now on the market there is no equipment that has more than 8 external antennas. And it is that we will have four antennas for the 2.4GHz band and another four antennas for the 5GHz band if our router is simultaneous dual band.
However, you may have purchased a Simultaneous triple band router (The third band can be in the 5GHz with “high” channels or in the new 6GHz band). In these cases where we have 8 antennas and a simultaneous triple-band router, it means that four of these external antennas are “dual”, so they emit in two frequency bands at the same time, so as not to have to put another four antennas in the router. dedicated.
Depending on the Wi-Fi standard, the number of antennas available and the channel width used, we will have a higher or lower wireless speed. In RedesZone we have explained how to know the maximum WiFi speed of our router.
Is it worth the extra expense?
According to which wireless clients you plan to connect, it will be worth it or not to opt for a cheaper model and one that has fewer WiFi antennas available, which translates into a lower WiFi class. Generally all wireless clients have 1 or 2 antennas to establish communicationTherefore, even if our router has four antennas, the wireless link will be synchronized at the maximum speed taking into account that antenna or those two antennas of the WiFi client.
The speed that we are going to achieve with our device with 2 antennas will be the same if the router has 4 antennas for that frequency band or only 2, because the “bottleneck” will be in the wireless client. Therefore, if you plan to buy a router with more antennas to provide greater speed to wireless clients, the truth is that you will not get better performance because the limitation will be in the client. However, you will notice an improvement if we use the Multi-User MIMO that current routers and WiFi clients incorporate.
However, that a router has more internal or external antennas translates into:
- With the Wi-Fi 6 standard we have MU-MIMO in all frequency bandsTherefore, if we have two or more wireless clients connected simultaneously and they support this feature, the router will be able to send data to several clients simultaneously, increasing the real global speed of the wireless network, since it will be continuously sending data. If they don’t support this MU-MIMO feature, we won’t notice any improvement.
- some more coverage: when the router has more WiFi antennas, it is possible to orient them in different ways to achieve homogeneous coverage throughout our house, both horizontally and vertically. Therefore, having more antennas means that we will have a little more coverage, but we will not notice it too much. What is important is put the router in a good place at home to provide the best coverage possible.
After doing dozens of analyzes of routers and WiFi Mesh systems, it is true that the more antennas the equipment has, the better it works wirelessly, however, there is not much of a difference to justify the price difference between a model with 2 antennas per frequency band to 4 antennas per frequency band. You will only notice a significant improvement if you plan to connect more than 20 devices simultaneously, and generating traffic. But for “normal” domestic use there are hardly any differences.
