Linksys Rolls Out a Pair of High End Wireless AC Routers

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Dual-band or tri-band, take your pick

It's getting a bit difficult to keep up with the fast evolving wireless router market, as newer and faster models built around the Wireless-AC standard keep coming out a furious pace. One of the most active players in the high-end router game is Linksys, which just announced two new models -- the Linksys AC3200 Tri-Band Smart Wi-Fi Router (EA9200) and the Linksys AC2400 Dual-Band Wi-Fi Router (E8350).
"Linksys is all about quality and performance. Our goal with these new routers is to provide a solution that will help families who have a lot of devices connected to the internet wirelessly achieve better performance on each device or for single users that demand high performance on a single device such as gaming or streaming video," said Mike Chen, vice president product development, Linksys. “"We have been working closely with our vendors to design and engineer these routers so they have advantages to outperform and provide the value consumers are looking for in high end routers."
The EA9200 Tri-Band model features six active antennas -- three on the outside and three more on the inside -- to provide six data streams. It also has a dual-core 1GHz CPU with three integrated co-processors for a total of 2.96GHz of penta-core processing power, which is used in part to drive the device's Smart functions.
There are three radios in all, including a single 2.4GHz radio with data transfer rates of up to 600Mbps (three spatial streams) and two 5GHz radios, each of which supports data transfer rates of up to 1300Mbps (three spatial streams). Though you can't combine all three channels into a single connection, Linksys adds the maximum data transfer speeds together to arrive at its AC3200 designation (600 + 1300 + 1300). It's a bit of a dubious practice, though one that all router makers participate in.
As for the E8350, it sports two radios with data transfer rates of up to 600Mbps on the 2.4GHz band (three spatial streams with 256QAM) and up to 1733Mbps on the 5GHz band (four spatial streams). There are four removable and adjustable antennas. According to Linksys, the E8350 provides the best overall performance to single devices that require high bandwidth, such as video streaming or online gaming.
The AC2400 (E8350) will be available today for $250 MSRP; the AC3200 (EA9200) will be released to retail this weekend for $300 MSRP.
Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook


More...