The more antennas, the better? What are the actual factors that affect the signal?

As Wi-Fi 6 enters the public's field of vision, many people are worried when changing routers. On the market, everyone is familiar with ASUS, NETGEAR, TP-link all selling on major e-commerce platforms to support Wi-Fi 6 routing, and support for Wi-Fi 6 routing has the advantages of reduced latency and increased Wi-Fi rate. But there are more Wi-Fi 6 routing antennas, does this really make the performance stronger? What are the unknown cold knowledge? Let's take a look below.

Let's start with the principle of the router. In 1997, IEEE802.11, the first wireless local area network standard, was born. It is a standard for wireless network communication defined by the International Society of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. At the same time, wireless routers were born. At this time, the wireless LAN standard has ushered in a rapid update iteration period, so the biggest change in the router is that the number of antennas becomes more and more, from the original one antenna to two, three, four and so on. But why does the antenna of the wireless router become more and more?

This is because in 2009, IEEE802.11n was updated in the IEEEE802.11 standard list. For the wireless network field, from this time on, it supports MIMO (Multi-input MulTI-output) multiple input multiple output technology.

Simply put, MIMO technology allows multiple antennas to receive data at the same time, so that more data packets can be transmitted at the same time and have a higher rate. The emergence of this technology has greatly improved and shortened the transmission time. From the previous 54Mbit/s of an antenna, to now a 150Mbit/s; moreover, the rate is superimposed according to the number of antennas. This is much like what we often say about the strength of people.

So the more antennas, the better?

In 2012, when the update of the 802.11ac standard came out, the router's transmission rate was increased to a new high: 433Mbit/s, and at the same time, it supports up to 8 shunts, that is, the transmission of eight front lines. However, they correspond to two different signals, that is, the 2.4GHz signal and the 5GHz signal that you have valued.

2.4GHz covers a wider range, but the signal is very susceptible to interference and the speed is relatively slow. On the other hand, 5GHz is the opposite. The signal transmission speed of 5GHz is faster and it is not easy to be interfered, but the signal penetration is slightly worse. In order to take into account the respective advantages of these two frequency bands, a dual-band router has been adopted, which can simultaneously transmit these two signals, using two different antenna technologies: a single-frequency antenna, one antenna transmits one signal; a dual-frequency antenna, An antenna transmits two signals.

What are the actual factors affecting the signal?

In the case where other hardware is equivalent, the two routers with the highest rate are close, the six antennas and the three antennas actually do the same thing, and the signal strength and coverage of the two will not be much different. But if the antenna itself is different, the size of the signal coverage is different.

Therefore, the most critical place to determine the signal strength is the transmit power of the Wi-Fi chip. If the transmission power is larger, the signal is naturally stronger and the coverage is wider. However, due to safety considerations, the country has a hardware limit of up to 20dB for the chip's transmit power, which is 100 milliwatts of transmit power.

Of course, other technical means can also be used to enhance the experience, for example, some wireless routers of NETGEAR will automatically use the antenna technology. Through this technology, the Wi-Fi signal can be locked to the device, and the signal that originally spread to the surroundings becomes a beam directly positioned and transmitted to the location of the device, so the signal and speed have naturally improved since then.

In the previous article on whether the Wi-Fi signal is harmful to the human body, it is also mentioned that when we choose a wireless router that declares high power, we should pay attention to its transmission power or when it has safety certification. NETGEAR’s wireless routers have all passed the SRRC safety certification, so you can use it with confidence no matter if you have pregnant women, children or the elderly at home.

So suppose A wireless router has 8 antennas and B wireless router has 4 antennas. Both use dual-band MIMO2X2 chips, other parameters are exactly the same. In this case, the signal of B will be better than A. The router adopts dual-band MIMO2X2, which means that it can set up to 4 antennas, so at least 4 antennas in A are false antennas, which may cause interference to other signals, resulting in worse signals.

If A wireless router has 4 dual-band antennas, B wireless router has 6 single-band antennas. Assuming that they are all effective antennas, the other parameters are exactly the same. In this case, the rate of A will be better than B. Because B's 6 single frequency antennas are equivalent to 3 dual frequency antennas, an additional antenna means that the maximum rate is different.

Having said that, is there any difference between single-antenna routing, dual-antenna routing, three-wire four-wire or more? Yes, but it has little effect on the actual use, including signal coverage, signal strength, and how fast the antenna is It is even more nonsense. Putting aside the single antenna that is already rare, the remaining "multi-antennas" are just the "medium" or "tool" for implementing MIMO technology. The difference is that the architecture used is different: common dual-antenna products mainly use 1T2R or 2T2R, three antenna products use 2T3R or 3T3R.

Summary and outlook

In theory, increasing the number of antennas will reduce the blind spots of signal coverage, but we have confirmed through a large number of evaluations that this difference is completely negligible in ordinary home environments. Moreover, just like the built-in antenna does not lose the external, the situation that the three-antenna coverage is not as good as the two-antenna is by no means an exception. In the final analysis, product quality is also an important factor.

As for the signal strength and "through the wall", it depends on the transmission power. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stipulates that it should not be higher than 20dBm (that is, 100mW), so the key to determining the signal coverage is the power of the chip, not the number of antennas. So as long as the routing uses effective MIMO technology, there is no need to care about the number of antennas.

If you want to know more, our website has product specifications for antennas, you can go to ALLICDATA ELECTRONICS LIMITED to get more information