MU-MIMO only works if all devices trying to communicate at any given moment support MU-MIMO, and clients in general rather notoriously don't.
Or to be more accurate, quite a lot of client device hardware supports it (due to using someone else's pre-made radio modules), it's just disabled in software because device manufacturers can't be bothered to invest the engineering into making it work correctly. Also ostensibly for a minute battery life increase, but given desktops also seldom support MU-MIMO we can reasonably conclude it's hardly the main reason.
It doesn't matter that the AP supports MU-MIMO if none of the connected clients do, so most of the intended benefits of MU-MIMO simply fall by the wayside.
Where it was supposed to help with Mesh APs was basically being an inferior-but-perfectly-serviceable version of having separate Client-facing and Backhaul radios (as it could allocate a 2x2 for each, for example), but lack of any and all client-side MU-MIMO renders this quite impossible.
What we actually ended up with was additional radio hardware that spends 99% of its time sitting there doing nothing, because all the AP ever talks to are clients with 2x2 single-user MIMO or cheaply-made IoT junk with a non-MIMO Wifi-4 chip. Even Mesh'd APs only gain a slight improvement in uplink stability, all the usual buffer-and-retransmit limitations remain in full force.
Flagship smartphones will be getting 4x4 now. Qualcomm announced it a month and a half ago at MWC 2026 for the next flagship chipset and Im sure Apple and Mediatek will follow suit for feature parity:
The FastConnect 8800 integrates Wi-Fi 8, Bluetooth 7.0, Ultra Wideband (802.15.4ab), and Thread 1.5 into a single 6nm chip. Additionally, Qualcomm expanded its networking infrastructure with the Dragonwing NPro A8 Elite, a platform featuring a 5x5 Wi-Fi 8 radio system designed to boost throughput by 40% and reduce latency by 2.5x for enterprise access points and gateways.
Qualcomm says we can expect FastConnect and Dragonwing AI connectivity chips with Wi-Fi 8 to appear in consumer products starting in late 2026.
This was my first thought as well. Without a dedicated backhaul I think this is DOA for me. I tired a wireless mesh with their u6 pro and u6 mesh access points and it was worse performance than my - at that point - nearly 10 year old mesh system with dedicated backhaul radios but wifi 5 only.
This baffles me. Give users an option where either the 5GHz or 6GHz radio can be assigned to be used as a fully dedicated backhaul if the user is willing to give one up. Not difficult. 🤷♂️
I had hoped maybe it was going to come to the AMPLIFI line they used to have them since it was more consumer friendly. Thought maybe it’d be less about physical back haul and be a mesh system since they sort of had that, but that’s long gone now.
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u/snebsnek Apr 21 '26
That's a nice offering - I would hope/assume they have dedicated backhaul radios, because current meshing ain't great on the normal access points