Friends who pay attention to our three easy lives may remember that in the past we have given everyone science more than once, and when purchasing a wireless router, we must not only look at the number of antennas. On the one hand, this is because the number of antennas can be "falsified", and the number of antennas seen may not really work. On the other hand, the working principle of the router is actually a computer in essence, so the CPU, memory, and even the level at which the manufacturer writes operating system code may actually have a greater impact on the user experience in many cases, but many low-end products will not tell everyone.
So since the wireless router can not only look at the number of antennas, what is the situation of wireless network card products? Today we will tell you about the number of wireless network card antennas.
The more network cards that used to have antennas, the stronger they really are
Although for WiFi routers today, more antennas do not necessarily mean stronger performance, for WIFi network cards, "the more antennas the higher the level" has also been an industry "truth".
For example, in Intel's wireless network card product line, there was once such an unwritten rule, that is, all dual antenna network cards can only be regarded as mid-range models, and only three-antenna wireless network cards are the real flagship products, which can be named "Ultimate".
For example, if you like to play "Black Apple" or "Black Qunhui", then you may have heard of two network card solutions produced by Broadcom, namely the three-antenna BCM4360 and the four-antenna BCM4366. Among them, especially BCM4366, there are still many players who insist on using this WiFi5 network card, and believe that it is difficult to have an opponent in terms of signal strength and coverage area.
However, if you carefully study the market development of wireless network cards, you will find that BCM4366 almost represents the moment when civil wireless network cards prosper and decline in "multi-antenna design" to some extent. Because just after this product, the entire consumer electronics industry has no manufacturer launched more than two antenna WiFi network cards, and even BCM4366's successor program BCM43684 has been released for more than two years, and has not been used by any network card products so far.
However, multi-antenna network cards are often flashy these days
Why is that? Because although the multi-antenna wireless network card looks "beautiful", in fact, the practical value is not as high as everyone thinks.
First of all, we should know that the "multi-antenna" design of the wireless network card needs to be matched with the corresponding router. For example, the Intel 5300, 6300, broadcom BCM4360, which are three-antenna concurrent WiFi4 network cards mentioned above, require a fairly high-end 450M class three-antenna 802.11n router to fully perform. In other words, for most dual-antenna routers, the performance of this multi-antenna network card will actually be limited.
Secondly, even if you use a wireless network card and a wireless router that match each other, it is not necessarily a good thing. For example, Broadcom's BCM4366 has four antennas, the theoretical connection bandwidth can reach 2167Mbps, if you use a high-end router product with a real four-way MIMO, then you can indeed "run full" the speed of this flagship wireless card. However, at this time, the four antennas of the router will all be occupied by the four antennas of the network card, and if even one more device is connected at this time, the delay of the entire network will be affected to a certain extent.
However, for the current home network environment, it is unlikely that the networking device has only one computer or mobile phone, so this is why the flagship router can now achieve 12-way, or even 16-way wireless concurrent design, but computers and mobile phones generally have only two antennas at most. After all, users obviously care more about the stability and low latency of the whole-house network environment than the high network speed of a single device.
Advances in technology have made dual antennas more and more useful
Of course, with the "decline" of multi-antenna wireless network card design, and dual antennas becoming the absolute mainstream of the industry, a very important problem has emerged. Compared with the three-antenna and four-antenna nics of the past, do today's dual-antenna NICs sacrifice the user experience? Actually, there is none.
On the one hand, thanks to the advancement of technology, today's WiFi6 and WiFi6E network cards can achieve at least 1200Mbps connection bandwidth on each antenna, and the dual antenna starts at 2400Mbps, which is faster than the four-antenna flagship card in the WiFi5 era. And fewer antennas means that the pressure on the router side is also reduced, especially for high-end 12 or even 16 antenna routers, you can connect multiple devices at the same time with lower latency, thus solving the needs of large-traffic, low-latency WiFi connections for today's home TV, game console, high-performance mobile phones and other devices.
On the other hand, from the actual working conditions, today's "dual antenna network card" even rounded a cow blown by the predecessors of that year. The Broadcom BCM4366 mentioned earlier, as a four-antenna WiFi5 network card, can reach up to 1000Mbps in the 2.4GHz band and 2167Mbps in the 5GHz band. However, for the network card in the WiFi5 era, it is impossible to work in these two frequency bands at the same time, so some network card manufacturers call BCM4366 "AC3100 network card", which is inevitably misleading.
However, in the latest WiFi6E, as well as the just released WiFi7 network card, it is possible to connect and superimpose two different frequency bands at the same time. Whether it's Qualcomm's FastConnect 6900, FastConnect 7800, or the Intel AX410, which still holds the half-masked face of the pipa, "dual connectivity" is a very important feature of theirs. It is also thanks to this feature that the latest dual-antenna wireless network card is not only faster than the previous three-antenna and four-antenna predecessors, but also "worthy of the name" in publicity.
【The picture of this article comes from the network】