this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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I'm not the most knowledgeable about networking hardware.
At what point are those antennas just excessive?
I believe the antennae are for different frequencies. Divide and conquer.
Not mainly
You point them in different directions because the speed is affected in which orientation your receiving antenna is. And with a phone it can be in just about every direction.
Every direction works, but it is just to get the most optimal bandwidth.
In the consumer-grade WiFi router all these antennas are omni-directional.
Unless you see something like this sticking out from your router, there will be no difference if you fold your antennas in a different way.
The only reason these antennas are sticking up from the router body is to lift them above the table surface, so your router will keep working even if you put it onto a metal table.
I think they were more attempting to reference antenna phasing rather than direction. Which can help apparently, but I've never seen a difference.
There needs to be way more antennas than six for an effective phase array, and they need to be set at fixed positions, not foldable.
So anyway, most of these antennas are only for better looks. The featureless white plastic box with internal antennas will work just the same, because plastic is transparent to WiFi signal. A spiked black altar of the wireless gods still looks more exciting.
It's beam forming and this says it calibrates each time so moving the antennas doesn't matter.
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/80211ac-a-survival/9781449357702/ch04.html
My understanding is most of the antennas on the Asus routers are dummies, just there for the look. Most have 2 actual antennas, some have 4.