Upgraded your home Wi-Fi lately?

Many of you got a new smartphone or tablet during the holiday. And many households have multiple smartphones and tablets all connecting to Wi-Fi. But when was the last time you upgraded how you get a wireless signal when you’re at home? 

On the phone from Toronto, Mathieu Whelan said that most modern devices are designed to take advantage of upgraded Wi-Fi technology. Adoption of the 802.11ac specification is “very high and growing”, said the regional product manager for Linksys/Belkin. Despite that, he added, few consumers have thought about getting a new router that can deliver faster wireless, or can accommodate multiple devices that are drawing on the router’s bandwidth. Unless you get a new router, as you have more smartphones and tablets connecting to your Wi-Fi, the download speed to each of them decreases. 

The next generation of AC technology is referred to as “MU-MIMO”, which stands for multiple user, multiple input, multiple output. Asus and Netgear have MU-MIMO routers in the market, and in 2015 Belkin will be issuing a range of new Linksys routers that adopt the standard. The EA 8500 AC 2600 Dual Band 4x4 router, for example, can serve up to four wireless devices at a time, and can deliver the maximum bandwidth possible to each of those devices before there is any decrease. 

Whelan said that iteration on the 802.11ac spec is still happening, and that it is technically possible for MU-MIMO to support more than just four devices simultaneously.