Nighthawk R7000 vs R8000

dallascowboysworldchamps wrote:
Why would you need two 5hz channels?

Say you had stopped using 2.4GHz. wireless because it had slowed down in your neighborhood or apartment due to a lot of interference from various sources. And you had cut out your cable TV and were now getting your TV and phone over the internet. Plus you have some other sources of media streaming, like a NAS, And you have laptops and mobile devices that want to just casually use the internet, but don't need a lot of speed. And several people live in your house or apartment that are doing different things on the internet. You might want some fairly clear bandwidth on 5GHz. for streaming, and maybe some bandwidth for the the devices that use the internet casually (not streaming), but you don't want them to disturb the streaming that's also going on.

I'm not in the place where I need that much bandwidth, but I do currently subscribe to cable TV, and only get about 28Mbps from my ISP. I also don't have a NAS currently, but we do stream Netflix and Amazon Prime movies. And we have 3 adults living here, with frequent adult visitors. So we couldn't use that much bandwidth, or even as much as we have now with the R7000.

However I can see how a router that can intelligently allocate a couple of radios between different purposes could be very useful under some circumstances. I don't think that the R8000 firmware is that intelligent in allocating particular usage patterns to radios itself at the moment, but I believe that you can do it manually. At some point in the future, the R8000 firmware may get to the point where it can transparently do the radio allocation, and things will work better for those that need that much bandwidth.

At the moment, the R7000 provides all the bandwidth that we need, with plenty of room for more *smile*.