Need advice and wireless 101 help

[Ephreal]

Hi

I am rather new to this site.

I have as everyone else wireless in my home. I am trying to understand how it really works.

I have a few questions. but if someone could direct me to a site explaining in depth how wireless works.

First off
What is the different between the number of antennas one router can have. I have a linksys EA65000 dual band router in my home. This one however have no visible antennas.

Is it better to have many antennas?

Does many antennas removed the speed penalty of using the AP as a repeater instead?


My setup at my home uses a Linksys EA6500 and main wireless AP. this router is connected again with cable to my cable modem.

My media center, xbox360 is an "island" in my living room and as such uses a bridge (Linksys WES610N) to connect to my linksys EA6500. This works and i can without any problems stream 20GB+ movies over this interface. My TV have its own wireless connection since for some reason the LAN interface does not work.

I guess in this setup you can call it a many-to-one connection. However i thought when i bought this system that i could dedicate one radio if you will to the bridge and one to act like a AP. right now the bridge is shared between all my 802.11n devices.


Hope i've made my self clear and some will be able to answer some of my question or guide me to where i can find the answer.



Regards
Ephreal

 

[stevech]

Hi

I am rather new to this site.

I have as everyone else wireless in my home. I am trying to understand how it really works.

I have a few questions. but if someone could direct me to a site explaining in depth how wireless works.

First off
What is the different between the number of antennas one router can have. I have a linksys EA65000 dual band router in my home. This one however have no visible antennas.

Is it better to have many antennas?

Does many antennas removed the speed penalty of using the AP as a repeater instead?


My setup at my home uses a Linksys EA6500 and main wireless AP. this router is connected again with cable to my cable modem.

My media center, xbox360 is an "island" in my living room and as such uses a bridge (Linksys WES610N) to connect to my linksys EA6500. This works and i can without any problems stream 20GB+ movies over this interface. My TV have its own wireless connection since for some reason the LAN interface does not work.

I guess in this setup you can call it a many-to-one connection. However i thought when i bought this system that i could dedicate one radio if you will to the bridge and one to act like a AP. right now the bridge is shared between all my 802.11n devices.


Hope i've made my self clear and some will be able to answer some of my question or guide me to where i can find the answer.



Regards
Ephreal

Number of antennas, internal or external, is governed by what WiFi options the product supports, in the varieties of "MIMO". Older WiFi without MIMO had two antennas for simple "switched diversity.
More antennas, visible or not, help sustain speeds despite reflections (multipath), and other impairments. Multi-stream options in MIMO WiFi can have better speeds - this is in the high end costly routers. But primarily, the laws of physics prevail, and competition for unoccupied channel air time in urban areas constrain speeds. Especially with more HDTV streaming.

Best speeds in a residence are predominately governed by choosing a channel that avoids a neighbor's WiFi that is used heavily for streaming.
Next, adding one or more APs gets the signal strength up, both directions, to benefit weakly client devices, esp. phones and tablets.

Multiple APs (the WiFi router counts as an AP), distributed, is more beneficial that trying to use high tech MIMO to overcome impairments.