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Forum Discussion
Netgear hyping STREAMS in Wi-Fi 6 routers is nonsense
Wow, 12 streams in the RAX120. Complete nonsense and meaningless (and computed wrong; there are 8 antennas).
Kudos to the first person that explains to the community (the correct answer) why s...
All these new wireless standards were abused by (consumer) marketing for years if not decades. When I think on how lazy multiple interfaces were simply added to create ACnnnnnnnnn and nobody ever cared. And buddy, the equation one antenna == on stream is certainly wrong.
I've seen the internals of another vendor device using the same Qualcomm platform - there were four 2.4 GHz and four 5 GHz antennas. And indeed, the Qualcomm platform can handle 12 streams.
FWIW 12 stream are implemented 4x 2.4GHz and 8x 5GHz
Yes. But why does that not matter for 802.11ax for the situation described? That is the point. Why is Netgear hyping something that really does not matter. 802.11ax is a game changer for the reason why.
A clue: Even a 2x2 802.11ax AP would be just as capable.
I beliee the AX120 can either operate the 5Ghz band as 8 streams or split into 2 bands of 4x4 like a triband effectively. The 8x8 mode wont be very useful till MU-MIMO is more widely used by client devices but that's already happening. A lot of Android phones already support MU and so do most new mid/high end laptops since the last 2 years or so that are using the Intel 8265ac and 9260 ac (aka Killer 1550) and Qualcomm QCA6174A (aka Killer 1535) would benefit with 8 stream mode even within the ac spec. Problem is how many people have more than 2-3 MU capable clients to make avail of 8 streams just yet. Then again it's becoming more widespread. Apple for one however uses non-MU capable Broadcom cards in all its devices.
