Dual-band wireless and multiple connections (Netgear N600)

Question

We have a Netgear N600 Dual-Band wireless router. Both antennae are being broadcast at the moment.

I am assuming that both antennae have there own NIC, because there are 2 Mac addresses posted on the device.

Is there any benefit, as far as distributing the load, by having both antennae active. I opened both up so those whose computers/devices can see the 5 GHz range can use it, while those that see the 2.4 GHz range can use it.

I was just hoping for some fringe benefits of it taking some of the strain off of the device as a whole, by having the connection distributed out over 2 antennae. Hope to not hear otherwise.

Ian

Answer 1

It cuts down on the traffic for each channel. Wireless networks operate at half duplex meaning if one devices is sending OR receiving traffic on a channel no other device can receive or send traffic at the same time, not even the same device.

Also It will create two subnets, one for each wireless SSID. This will also cut down on the broadcast traffic on the network so you can have one isolated just for streaming or gaming and it won't have to deal with idle traffic that happens constantly on a network, like ARP requests and net bios traffic from the other PC's on the network.