Stefan Mileschin

The Wi-Fi router market has seen a yearly cadence of flagship releases since the first 802.11ac routers came into the market in early 2012. Starting with 3x3 solutions, the market moved on to 4x4 and MU-MIMO-enabled Wave 2 solutions. We also saw Broadcom taking the lead with a dual 5 GHz radio solution (that has now been adopted by Qualcomm Atheros also). Many networking equipment vendors introduced solutions based on this. The recent mesh networking craze is also an offshoot of this dual radio solution - a dedicated 'invisible' channel is used to link the satellite to the main router (a discussion for another day). At CES earlier this year, the TP-Link Talon announcement indicated that tri-band Wi-Fi was getting traction in the market. Tri-band Wi-Fi involves radios operating in 2.4 GHz (802.11n), 5 GHz (802.11ac) and 60 GHz (802.11ad) bands. Today, Netgear is launching their first tri-band Wi-Fi solution - the flagship Nighthawk X10. It will be marketed as an AD7200-class router and will carry the R9000 model number.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10771/...00-wifi-router