I take my home networking seriously. I am constantly on the lookout for the latest and greatest networking equipment. Let me put it this way. When my house was being built, I actually snuck in one evening to run Ethernet cabling to every room in my house. This was back in the day when Wi-Fi was in its infancy and speed was just ok (all of 12 years ago). On my next house however I may finally just go all Wi-Fi thanks to the speed increases we’re seeing in the dual band routers nowadays. And one of those is the new Linksys WRT3200ACM Wi-Fi router (yeah, I know it’s a mouthful).
To start off with, this Wi-Fi router has more processing power than my first computer. And my second. And my third.
It also makes use of MU-MIMO technology.
“Ohhhhh, that’s nice” I hear you saying to yourself.
Let me explain. My wife is a heavy bandwidth user. As a blogger she is constantly running multiple browsers with multiple windows doing multiple things. That may not sound like much, but when you are talking multiple twitter and Facebook sessions, plus YouTube and the like, it adds up fast. As for me, I’m a programmer. So when I’m not watching cat videos, I’m am connected to my corporate network or to the cloud running a lot of network intensive resources. And when I’m not doing that, I am gaming (I know, shocking right). We are constantly fighting each other for bandwidth. It’s a real pain.
So how does MU-MIMO help? Think of it as a fancy network cable (yes, I’m going to simplify here). When you are connected to the network with a network cable you are the only one using that cable. MU-MIMO basically gives your Wi-Fi a network cable to your router. So instead of sharing the Wi-Fi with your bandwidth hogging wife, you get your own slice. So your cat videos can stream at full speed. Plus, for the things that need their own hard wired connection, it still has four gigabit Ethernet ports. Perfect for my network drive and printer. So if you are looking to upgrade your home Wi-Fi to something that can handle you your network needs, check out the Linksys WRT3200ACM Wi-Fi router at Best Buy today.
Disclaimer: The reviewer was compensated in the form of a Best Buy Gift Card or received the product at a reduced price or for free
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