sfx2000
Part of the Furniture
does anyone know how many or how ubiquitous 3 stream clients are in the market place right now?
also, does 3 stream benefit 2 stream client performance?
3-stream clients - mostly embedded from Marvell, Intel and Broadcom for OEM's - Ralink has client silicon, and that is mostly found in USB dongles (Trendnet was reviewed recently here on this site).
Main benefit right now for 3-Stream is capacity, and the 3 stream SW stacks tend to implement more of the advanced (and optional) features of 802.11n, and at the AP side, this improves things for all STA's attached to that AP.
It's not going to make a 2-stream or a single stream STA's any faster, but there are definite and observable capacity improvements, which is significant considering that most phones these days, along with other consumer electronics, have on-board WiFi.
If you're in the market for a new Access Point, I recommend having 3 stream and dual band as a requirement.