Currently routers have several MIMO antennas, or MU-MIMO if the equipment is compatible with this technology. That a router has several internal or external antennas is essential to provide great wireless performance, regardless of whether we are going to connect a device via Wi-Fi, or if we are going to connect several. The more antennas we have, the more data streams we can send simultaneously. However, it is also very important that Wi-Fi clients such as PCs or mobiles have 2 antennas whenever possible, because this will guarantee us a higher speed, and also a greater Wi-Fi coverage.
Why is it necessary for Wi-Fi routers and clients to have multiple antennas?
Since the Wi-Fi 4 standard, wireless routers and clients have MIMO technology, that means that they are capable of using several antennas simultaneously to send information, therefore, we will have 2, 3 and even 4 data streams. More antennas means faster link sync speed, and more true wireless speed we’ll get. In this article we publish a complete article on the maximum speeds that we will achieve via Wi-Fi depending on the number of antennas, now Qualcomm has made a comparison between a mobile device with one antenna and another mobile device with two antennas.
In the following image you can see how the device with two antennas achieves around twice the speed of the first , something logical since we only have one data stream. However, compared to the device with an antenna, we also go further achieving the same speed as the device with an antenna, that is, if we use a PC or mobile phone with two Wi-Fi antennas, we will achieve the same speed as the device. of an antenna when we move away from the main AP.
If we take that 300Mbps of Internet connection speed is the most normal today, we can see that with the device with two antennas we will achieve this speed in the vast majority of rooms in our home, however, with the device with one antenna We will only achieve this speed when we are very close to the Wi-Fi access point.
With this Qualcomm study, it is shown that having a PC or a mobile device, be it a smartphone or tablet, with two internal antennas, is essential to achieve great wireless performance, and also to achieve a greater range of coverage without losing too much speed. The number of antennas affects both Wi-Fi 5 networks and Wi-Fi 6 networks, this means that, if we have a WiFi antenna with the new WiFi 6 standard, we will not achieve the same performance as if it had two antennas, logically, although it is true that compared to Wi-Fi 5 it will work better for us and we will have more speed and a little more wireless coverage.
If you have a laptop with an old Wi-Fi card, recently in this article we have updated the internal WiFi card of our laptop to Wi-Fi 6 , to get the best wireless performance when testing equipment with the latest standard. If your equipment has the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard, it is also very important that it supports 160MHz of channel width, thanks to this feature, we can achieve speeds higher than 1000Mbps real in the wireless connection, that is, wirelessly we will be faster than the Gigabit Ethernet wired interface.
