Does this ridiculous number of antennas even do anything or is it just marketing wank?
memes
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
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.
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.
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.
I believe it's for beam forming which can be used to improve signal strength in a specific direction.
tell that to the $800 of copper running through my walls.
Still cheaper
My PC, laptop, work laptop, are all wired using gigabit. But my laptop on wifi reach 1200Mbps so it's faster than cable!
Impressive, I lose half my speed with the router around the corner.
I'm seriously thinking of getting a usbC-ethernet dongle for my mobile, for when I'm at my desk.
But that cable can't summon Kel'Tuzad unlike the router.
Phased arrays are not a joke. You can get ridiculous dynamic range with those
I have a cat 5 cable running to a wireless access port that is connected to my wireless router. Online I show as having a physical connection, because the last connection to the PC is a plug.
The connection is also pretty solid compared to when I try to use wifi on the same PC to connect to the same wireless access point, which is just over 6 foot away with no obstructions (just checked), or the main router which is in another room.
Seems weird, but it works.
Your PC probably has poor antennas and/or WiFi chipset. The pc might also be located in a worse place
Just use something shielded and at least cat 5