Routers are those devices that the ISP technician installs at your home to settle your ADSL or fiber line that you would never concern yourself with, at least if it is a small house, because if it’s a big house or a villa, the chances of having problems with the Wi-Fi are much higher.
That’s why for these situations it’s better to use better routers such as the NETGEAR Nighthawk X8 AC5300 Smart WiFi.
It is a model that will sell for $399, and some features that make it already a great model for those who want the best. It includes eight antennas in total (four internal and four external), six Gigabit Ethernet ports, one WAN port, a USB 2.0 port and a USB 3.0 port.
Ethernet connections are 802.3AD Dynamic, which means you can connect two Ethernet cables to a single device and automatically they are multiplexed as a single connection. But only if the device you are connecting also supports 802.3AD, though some NAS already support it, and that for a local network can be very interesting (moving files between networked computers at speeds of 250 MB/s is a big plus).
Furthermore, the antennas are MU-MIMO, though Netgear will not activate this capacity until a hardware upgrade. MU-MIMO allows for each of the antennas to be used for separate connections, as the very common MIMO antennas are forced to be used on a single connection, delivering access time between each device. In other words, if you have three computers at home downloading a file, they will actually get access to only 33% of the time to Wi-Fi, so that the maximum speed is reduced to a third part. That’s why MU-MIMO is very useful, and anyone who wants a router should not buy one that doesn’t have this feature.
Being a device with eight antennas, you can set up to three separate connections to get a combined speed of 5.3 Gbps. In practice, there are two connections Wi-Fi 802.11 ac 5GHz of up to 2,166 Gbps and a third in the 2.4 GHz at 1 GHz band, all working independently, and the router can dynamically choose which connection is best for each connected device.
The Wi-Fi amplifiers have been moved to the top of the antennas, rather than inside the router to improve signal strength and avoid crosstalk and signal loss in its usual position on the plate. Netgear promises increased signal strength in all scenarios. The Nighthawk X8 has some impressive features, but its price can make some people back off.