LINKSYS UNVEILS BLAZING FAST WI-FI ROUTER
THERE ARE ROUTERS on the market that claim they’re MU-MIMO-ready, but to the best of our knowledge, all of them are still waiting on official firmware to support the feature. That’s not the case with the Linksys EA8500 ($280 MSRP)—it’s ready to go right out of the box.
Supporting MU-MIMO is an important part of the evolution of routers. According to Linksys, the average home now has more than eight connected devices. The router you’re using now can only accommodate one of those devices at a time, meaning all the others have to get in line. You might not notice it much, if at all, because single-user MIMO routers are fast, they’re just not as speedy or efficient as MU-MIMO-enabled routers. One place you might notice this is when streaming videos—frequent buffers could be the result of a congested network.
By way of MU-MIMO, the EA8500 can dish out bandwidth to all of your devices at once—it’s like they’re all connected to their own router, provided your devices also support MU-MIMO. If not, well, we suppose the EA8500 amounts to future-proofing your home network, at least to the extent that home networks can be future-proofed.
Linksys rates the EA8500 as an AC2600 router, though as we always feel the need to point out, the rating is a bit of marketing fluff because it combines the speeds of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies—up to 800Mb/s on the 2.4GHz channel and up to 1,733Mb/s on 5GHz, or 2,533Mb/s. Apparently, that rounds up to AC2600, but aside from that, you can’t combine the total bandwidth of both channels. We’re not picking on Linksys here, as all router makers have adopted this way of marketing their devices.
Other specs and features include a 1.4GHz dual-core CPU, beamforming support, four removable external antennas, four Gigabit ports, USB 3.0 port, and a combo USB 2.0/eSATA port for cloud streaming and sharing data across a network.