Is Wifi Tri-Band worth it?

wright_here

Hi All,

I am going to update my wifi router (currently standard virgin superhub 3) and was just wondering if Tri-Band wifi is actually worth it or not?

Whats your thoughts?

Thanks

mickevh

"Tri band" is like having 3 Access Points in one box, on serving the 2.4GHz waveband, (usually) two serving the 5GHz using different radio frequencies.  The advantage is that all those AP's can transmit/receive concurrently with each other which mitigates the "only one thing at a time can transmit" paradigm of Wi-Fi.

It's just the same as if you bought 3 physical AP's, co-located them and took some care about how you tuned the radio channels they used.

Therefore, whether it's "worth it" is a value judgement based on how many client devices you have, how much data they need to transmit, how much they are currently competing with each other for "air time" and whether you can distribute your clients between the AP's.

psychopomp1

If you have a very high speed connection such as cable or FTTP and you have a tonne of wifi connected devices, then definitely worth using a tri-band router as the extra 5ghz band is very useful. After i had FTTP installed (330 Mbps), i bought a tri-band Linksys EA9500v2 and it works like a dream. Just be aware that most (if not all) tri-band routers come with a feature called 'auto band steering' which means that the 5ghz SSID just has one name and the router automatically assigns your devices to one of the 2 5ghz bands. However from experience this doesn't always work well, as the router algorithms for band steering aren't perfect so often you end up with an unequal balance of devices on the 5ghz bands. Far better to switch off band steering so that you can manually choose which of the 3 bands you want your devices to connect to, ie you have full control of the router bands.