What is the purpose of multiple antennas on wireless routers? Stronger signal or more signals?

[cosmicvoyager]

Greetings,

What is the purpose of multiple antennas on wireless routers? Stronger signal or more signals?

Are identical signals or different signals sent on each antenna?

Can multiple directional antennas pointing in different directions be used?

Thanks

 

[ex_bubblehead]

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/MIMO.html

 

[bill001g]

Old routers used to select the strongest signal to the end user so it would pick the best one.

The current ones attempt to transmit multiple overlapping signal ...ie mimo to get more speed.

The very latest 802.11ac have a new feature called beam forming that is suppose to created a direction signal by modifying the interference pattern between antenna to increase the range.....not much information on if this really works in the real world yet since it is very new.

You can use multiple direction antenna and the router will attempt to use them to talk to different users. You will lose all the advantages of mimo and such since they are dependent on detection of the radio patterns between antenna. Used to be a very common thing to do to replace antenna but I suspect those days are gone since the antenna are so important to the new features and the physical spacing and power output is closely engineered.