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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...
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.
To everyone reading this, if you don't immediately know the answer to the first question, you are missing something huge about the changes in 802.11ax...
- With MU-MIMO streams do matter. More streams means more devices active in parallel and that means better peak download speeds when multiple MU devices are actively in use at once. Withou MU clients are active 1 after the other in a round robin fashion.
Other than maybe current Apple devices, a lot of new devices (phones/laptops) support MU at least on the downlink side. I really don’t see anything wrong with advertising that.
