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See also Wireless Networking and Multi-Band Wi-Fi in tech and Wi-Fi Mesh Networking below.
Contents:
Standrds:
Designation / Notation ACxxxx AC1900 = AC Standard 1900 Mbps total (600 Mbps on 2.4 GHz and 1300 on 5 GHz) To get higher than 1900 Mbps routers use 2 5Ghz radios (tri-band). See terms below for more specifications 802.11n vs 802.11ac 802.11n and 802.11ac are both dual band routers with 2.4 and 5 GHz radios. 802.11ac can support more antennas, up to 8, and has a higher bandwidth per antenna vs 802.11n. 802.11n supportes four spatial streams (4x4 MIMO) and a channel width of 40MHz 802.11ac suports eight spatial streams and has channels up to 80MHz wide See MIMO: Why Multiple Antennas Matter | Cisco Meraki Blog Does An AC Router Improve N Device Performance? - SmallNetBuilder They compared AC routers against the top-ranked ASUS RT-N66U as the reference N router. Download speed improvement: | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Model | Netgear R6220 AC1200 | Netgear R6250 AC1600 | Netgear R7000 AC1900 | Netgear R8000 X6 AC3200 4 | Linksys WRT1900ACS | Asus RT-AC68U AC1900 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Price | $80.00 | $99.00 | $170.00 | $280.00 | $180.00 | $160.00 |
| Band | Mbps | |||||
| 2.4GHz | 300 | 300 | 600 | 600 | 600 | 600 |
| 5 GHz | 867 | 1300 | 1300 | 1300 | 1300 | 1300 |
| 2nd 5 GHz | 1300 | |||||
| Beamforming | y | y | y | y | y | |
| CPU MHz | 800MHz | 800MHz dual-core | 1GHz dual-core | 1GHz dual-core | 1.6GHz dual-core | 800MHz dual-core |
| USB | 2.0 | 3.0 | 2.0 + 3.0 | 2.0 + 3.0 | 2.0 + 3.0 | 2.0 + 3.0 |
| QOS | y | dynamic | y | |||
| Smart Connect | y | y | ||||
| Antennas | 2 | 3+2 1 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 3 |
| Cloud2 | y | y | ||||
| Time Machine Support 3 | y | y | ||||
| Amazon score | 4.1 (541) | 3.9 (382) | 4.3 (8,582) | 3.9 (3,780) | 4.3 (3,039) | |
| Cnet | 8.0 | 6.7 | 8.3 | 8.8 | ||
| WAN to LAN thruput (Mbps) | 931 | 806 | 809 | 778 | ||
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1. The Netgear R6250 has 2 2.4 GHz antennas and 3 5 GHz antennas QoS - Quality of Service - pritorizes connections to give presidence for video streaming, gaming, Smart connect - Selects fastest WiFi for each device 2. Cloud - Allow access from outside your network 3. Apple Time Machine backup software will work with a drive attached to the router. 4. The Netgear R8000 is a tri-band router with 2 5GHz radios. See Other Tri-band Routers above Total Simultaneous Throughput - TCP | Small Net Builder
Router Charts - LAN to WAN Throughput - TCP | Small Net Builder 
Consumer Reports (CR) - routers CR Tech - Electronics Buying Guide) CR Score Netgear AC1900 Nighthawk (R7000) 802.11ac $185 85 Netgear N750 (WNDR4300) 802.11n $90 77 Apple AirPort Extreme (6th gen) 802.11ac $185 73 D-Link AC190 (DIR-880L) 802.11ac $180 71 Linksys AC1900 802.11ac $200 71 Wi-Fi Mesh Networking A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. It was originally for companies with multiple locations with nodes linked by satelite, wireless or traditional wired connections. In 2016 a bunch mesh networks for large homes came on the market. See The Best Wi-Fi Mesh Networking Kits for Most People | The Wirecutter Terms: 802.11 - IEEE specifications for wireless local area networking (WLAN) DLNA - Digital Living Network Alliance - Certifies products for Audio, Video and Image TVs, PCs, Mobile Phones, NAS servers, DMAs DMA - Digital Media Adapter - Interface to devices like TVs and Stereos DOCSIS - Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification DOCSIS 3.0 - 2006 - IPv6 support, 4 channel, download bandwidth of 1.5 Gbit/s and upload of 150 Mbit/s based DSSS - Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (Radio Technology) HTTPS - Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (uses SSL) mDNS - multi-cast DNS MIMO - Multiple Input, Multiple Output - Antenna technology using multiple antennas MU-MIMO - Multi User MIMO NAS - Network Attached Storage (Hard drive accessible over the network) OFDM - Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (Radio Technology) PoE - Power over Ethernet SNMP - Simple Network Management Protocol - Remote management SSID - Service Set Identifier - Network name SSL - Secure Sockets Layer - Uses cryptographic protocols for secure network communications UDP - User Datagram Protocol Wave 2 - WPS - Wi-Fi Protected Setup
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