I heavily recommend for everyone who wants to make correct decisions about Wi-Fi hardware to read this page: https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html h

I heavily recommend for everyone who wants to make correct decisions about Wi-Fi hardware to read this page: https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html The author visibly knows their stuff and goes into channels, ac, ax, 2x2, 4x4, MU-MIMO, beamforming, etc in great detail. But the summary of what I took from that is the times when consumer routers were bad are mostly over. Modern high performance Wi-Fi has a lot of radio magic, so your two-antenna laptop can talk to two antennas of router via two multipath-propagated spatial streams while the router uses its two more antennas to form directed beams and get more signal so more range and speed. All of that needs a lot of signal processing magic, and is heavily proprietary and patented, so at the moment it won't work well on non-blob firmware and drivers. And even small manufacturers have trouble here - in pure Wi-Fi performance, Mikrotik would be behind Asus or Netgear or something, even if it has more features and more professional interface. Of course, you only need to care about that if you need local-network performance or you internet connection speed approaches Wi-Fi speeds, otherwise it doesn't really matter.