The second wave of 802.11ac routers are now shipping, and they offer a tantalizing performance benefit over the previous routers we?ve reviewed (at least with their older firmware) ? the ability to broadcast multiple data streams to several clients at once. This technology, named MU-MIMO, which stands for Multiple User: Multiple Input, Multiple Output, is just now starting to roll out, and is different in one obvious way to the previous technology, named simply MIMO.

The previous solution was only able to broadcast multiple streams of data, but could only transmit to one client at a time, whereas this new MU-MIMO technology can send multiple data streams to multiple users at the same time, so it could represent quite a leap forward in performance when multiple MU-MIMO enabled systems are connected through the router. The industry, and users like ourselves, have been looking forward to this advancement for quite some time...