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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...
It's not about MU-MIMO vs. OFDMA my friend.
MU-MIMO is a mandatory feature on 802.1ax - very different from 802.11ac. You are trying to hype OFDMA - a feature very helpful when it comes to many clients requiring smaller data rates, or in environments with a large number of concurrent wireless clients/IoTs.
When it comes to the naked throughput, serving a small number of capable clients, a single 802.11ax 8x8:8 system radio (QCN5154) with a max rate of 9.6 Gb/s will outperform a 802.11ax 4x4:4 radio (BCM42684) at 4.8 Gb/s.
Some oddities remain - for the moment it appears the Qualcomm has to fall back to 4x4:4 for a 160 MHz channel coverage, and there must be shortcomings when it comes to DFS handling obviously - as reflected that the initial AX12 firmware won't support DFS.
My heart would go more for an design with two 5 GHz radios 80 MHzin 4x4:4 and with a workable DFS support - while the freeky perfromance geeks will continue to look for the 8.8:8 system.
MU-MIMO does have a lot of benefits, but you almost never get those benefits in the real world (you will get benefits in a static test setup; something you can configure with patience at home). In an enterprise setup, I have not seen anyone say that it works (in fact the opposite: everything I see says that it does not work in the enterprise). The achilles heel of MU-MIMO is that it requires spatial diversity between the 'multiple' devices, and the overhead of the management frames.
The point of this post was to try to educate people that 802.11ax changes the game. In 802.11ax, there are TWO multi-user mechanism. MU-MIMO and MU-OFDMA. They are not the same thing (which most people like likely overlook and not fully realize). MU-OFDMA is multi-user support baked into the 802.11ax protocols. Up to nine users can be supported per 20 Mhz channel (so up to 36 in 80 Mhz). So in very dense environments (classrooms, stadiums, etc) 802.11ax does a large advantage (but only with 802.11ax clients). So a 'four' stream 802.11ax router can actually transmit to lots of users at the same time.
Of course, the only way to take full advantage of Wi-Fi 6 benefits is with Wi-Fi 6 clients -- which will not happen for many years.
I agree -- two (band) 4x4 is way better than one 8x8 -- for most people.
freaky performance geeks: Well, the fact that Netgear's max speed for 8x8 RAX12 is the same as Netgear's max speed for 4x4 RAX8 (both are AX6000) will hopefully make the geeks go 'hmmmm'.