Tri-Band Wifi; How Tri-Band Wifi Improves Speed And Performance - NETGEAR R8300 User Manual

Nighthawk X8 AC5000 Tri-Band WiFi Router

Tri-Band WiFi

Tri-band WiFi delivers combined WiFi speeds of 3.2 Gbps through three dedicated WiFi bands—a 2.4 GHz band
plus two 5 GHz bands. This additional 5 GHz WiFi band allows you to double the WiFi bandwidth for dual-band
devices.
Figure 6. Tri-band WiFi doubles the available bandwidth for dual-band devices
Smart Connect intelligently selects the best WiFi band for each dual-band device to optimize connection speed and
performance based on that device's speed and performance capabilities. This additional WiFi bandwidth combined
with the intelligence to segregate traffic based on WiFi speed and load balancing provides the best performance for
multiple WiFi devices in your home.

How Tri-Band WiFi Improves Speed and Performance

Tri-band WiFi increases the available WiFi bandwidth for your network to reduce network congestion.
Typically, a dual-band WiFi router shares bandwidth among all connected devices that are downloading data at the
same time. So if you are watching a Netflix movie on your Internet-enabled large-screen TV while your kids are
watching a YouTube video on a smartphone, the router shares the bandwidth across these two devices. This is
particularly unfair for the faster 802.11ac devices or three-stream (3x3) 802.11n devices because their speeds are
reduced to the speed of the slowest device in the network. Even one slow device can bring down the entire network
speed.
In this simplified example, the 5 GHz band is capable of a maximum speed of 1733 Mbps, but the actual speed
could be limited by the device capability. For example, an Apple MacBook Pro with support for three streams is
capable of the maximum 1300 Mbps, but the Tri-Band WiFi Connections iPhone 5S with support for only single-stream
802.11n can achieve a maximum WiFi speed of only 150 Mbps. As more devices connect and begin downloading,
the bandwidth is shared among them as well.
The following example of shared bandwidth shows a dual-band router in which the GHz WiFi band is capable of a
fast 640 Mbps speed. If only one computer or device connects, the router can allocate a speed of up to 640 Mbps
to that connection, assuming that the device is capable of that speed. When more devices connect to the 5 GHz
Tri-Band WiFi Connections
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