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Comment by ejdyksen | Hacker News Reader

It has a 3rd radio that monitors the channels you aren't currently using to see if any of them are better. The first two radios in the device can't switch without dropping connections, so they can't go hunting for new channels once the AP is turned on.

My Airport Extreme chooses channels automatically at boot time, then never again. This is fine for my house though, because my neighbors are reasonably far away.

At work, our Meraki AP has this kind of 3rd radio, and we get very good performance in a terrible RF environment, where lots of other equipment (from Apple and Ubiquiti) has failed.

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Doesn't this only really buy you time until everyone around you has the same router? If everyone is constantly changing channels to compensate for neighbours I can't imagine the performance to be great, but perhaps I'm missing something.

Sounds like an awesome feature. I'm a huge fan of Ubiquiti, and was planning to get some APs for my house. But this Google thing looks way better now.

Which is a standard feature in a lot of other routers, too, like the Fritz!Box 7490. http://en.avm.de/products/fritzbox/fritzbox-7490/

Google is doing nothing special here.

I don't see anything on the spec sheets for the Fritz!Box 7490 that show it has more than 2 radios, like most dual band APs out there today.

Google's spec sheet [1] specifically has 3 radios:

http://i.imgur.com/x7CMktb.png

The first two radios do MIMO 3x3, and the third radio just has 1 antenna (since it isn't serving client traffic).

While this isn't completely new, it's definitely not common, especially for a consumer-grade AP/router.

[1]: https://on.google.com/hub/#specs

The Fritz!Box 7490 has 3 radios, for exactly this purpose. That’s how it supports automated channel search without disconnecting users, and how it is able to provide 1.3Gbps via WiFi.

If it does have 3 radios, that's awesome. They should make that much more explicit. I've looked all over their site, and I can't find anything that confirms this. Everything on their website just references plain old simultaneous dual-band with MIMO antennas.

For me, at least, a 3rd radio will be on the list for my next AP, so I'll take a close look at this one, too.

Well, they claimed it. I am not sure if they do have one, but switching channels and empty-channel-autodiscovery without disconnecting is a feature in the version that I have.

The issue is just that AVM produces different versions of the Fritz!Box for every ISP, so some have more storage, or more radios than others.

That Fritz!Box 7490 is US $320 on Amazon. OnHub is $200. I doubt many the sub $100 routers most people get do that sort of thing. So maybe nothing special but that is quite a high end router you're comparing it to.

Well, it’s the default router that ISPs give you for free if you sign a one-year contract here. (Yes, you can keep it even after the contract ends).

So, it’s pretty much in every house in Germany.

If OnHub has to compete against this (for the consumer free) router, then it’ll have a hard time.

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