Maverick009
Senior Member
You make some good points. Except I can't agree with wasting money on an AC router right now unless you are clearly looking for a budget solution. Those older Wifi technologies will be obsoleted over the next five years. Since I like to update my hardware every four to five years by the time I am ready to upgrade to Wifi 6Ew2 or 7 there will be many more Wifi 6 clients available. I will be able to wait longer before choosing the next generation upgrade. This saves me money by giving me time to wait for the cost effective next gen options in the long run.
The thing you have to remember, is Manufactures and OEMS, like ASUS, Netgear, Linksys, etc., are building a stack of devices to meet everyone's budget and price accordingly to that. The other part to that, is if you are looking just for a performance/distance ratio, yes it could be argued that a 4x4 AC router can out class a 2x2 AX router, but that is not always the case. The 2nd part, is your not just buying an AX router for performance/distance, but also for more advanced features, which alot of them come standard even on the cheapest AX routers, as it is part of the AX WiFi6 standard. Some of those features, include enhanced 160mhz channel/signaling, WAP3 security, Better beamforming, OFDMA, which allows WiFi6 Routers to communicate to multiple devices at once, vs. Wifi5 AC routers which can only communicate to one device at a time, AP Spatial streams - AX routers come mainly standard with 8 vs. 4 in AC, allowing them to consistently outperform right out of the box. AX can also use both the 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz allowing more throughput, and AX supports enhanced MU-MIMO, allowing simultaneous downloading and uploading on multiple devices. AC only supports MU-MIMO for downloading, and AX has QAM1024 vs AC with support for only QAM256.
Those are some of the major differences. There are a few other differences too. So distance/performance is not an exact apples to apples comparison, as there are a lot of under the hood improvements. The AXE routers coming soon, just add one additional piece to the aquation, that IMO, should of been part of the first wave, but was not finalized, so they moved on without that feature.