2 or 4 Antenna Kit For Linksys WRT1900AC?

[willowen100]

Hi

I'm thinking of buying the Linksys high-gain antenna kit either in the set of 2 or 4, and I'll be wall mounting the router to get it off the floor where it is almost positioned at the moment. Because the router is both 2.4GHz and 5GHz will I need to upgrade all 4 antenna's or could have a mixture or 2 stock one's and 2 upgraded one's?

Will

 

[bill001g]

Messing with the antenna on a 802.11ac router is not as easy as it once was. The new routers use interference pattern between the antenna to get more bandwidth. This is based both on the antenna gain as well as the antenna spacing. You may get more signal level but less actual throughput.

People spend there whole careers doing antenna design so its hard to say the affect even if you replace all 4 antenna. Generally most routers are designed to output the maximum legal power and the antenna are optimized to use the radio chips in the router.

In most cases it is the end device and not the router that causes most issues because they tend to not transmit at full power and have very tiny antenna.

In reality you likely never use more than 2 antenna anyway. Most end consumer equipment only has 2 antenna so it will only use 2 of the router antenna even if there are 4. Now if you were to replace only 2 antenna I am not sure how the router determines which 2 of the 4 antenna it users.

If you are going to try it I would replace all 4 but it will likely not cause much improvement since the problems are likely on the end device