hey
as a novice home user I got a hap ac2 at my home at it working fine, no problem with wifi or anything so is there any advantage for me to opgrade to a hap ac3??
There is never a reason to upgrade when content with the functionality.
I would say even an upgrade to ax3 is not going to provide a significant enough improvement, mainly because its almost experimental in that MT has only recently using standard chipsets vice proprietary and there is lots of teething pains and it will take time to sort out. Hence its almost smarter to wait.
When MT comes out with 160mhz wifi 6 device, or bettter wifi 6E device, or then again, next gen WIFI 7… Then it would be worth considering IMHO
The problem with upgrading is that its really not worth it unless you know what you want, and know what you have.
I would say a general rule of thumb is to stay current with your smartphone as that is the biggest user of wifi generally in households.
In other words it matters little what vendors put on their networking devices if other device vendors dont use that tech or standard.
So for example if apple and samsung dont bother with wifii 6E and go straight to wifi7, then buying a wifi router or AP with wifi 6E would be a waste of time.
So no need to jump the gun just yet.
You should be getting somewhere between 200-400 on your smartphone for throughput on 5ghz network for example …
hAP ac2 and hAP ac3 are same generation devices, built around very similar SoC Which in theory means they should behave very similarly. However: hAP ac3 comes with 128MB of flash storage which in practice means it can run wifiwave2 driver for wireless (hAP ac2 has too small storage). And wifiwave2 driver means quite notable increase in wireless performance (and adds support for newest WPA3 standard). So yes, hAP ac3 is definitely improvement over hAP ac2. Is it worth the investment? That’s your call.
However, there’s newer generation of hAP devices out: hAP ax2 and hAP ax3 … which come with enough flash storage to run wifiwave2 (in fact they have to, they are not supported by legacy wireless driver) and have slightly faster CPU. Whether the improved performance is worth of slight price increase depends both on local market prices and on your needs/expectations. Beware that both hAP ax (2 and 3) are relatively new products and still experience some teething problems (discussed in various forum threads), while hAP ac (2 and 3) are already mature products (and the kinks still present are probably here to stay).
Since you haven’t written any details (like “I have only 5Mbit/s from Internet”, I’m rich, etc.), let alone if you wrote a useful one, the reply, for me,is very simple:
If it works fine for you, what the hell do you change it to do?
The WiFi performance is better on the hAP ac3 due to having real antennas if nothing else.
Or receive the interferences better…
They are points of view, and it depends on where you use it…
I have both. Used ac3 as my main wifi router and the wifi is not as strong as I thought. Then I bought AC2 just to try it and it has stronger wifi signals in my setup despite the fact it has no external antenna. So I use the AC2, which have almost the same processing power but better wifi.
I don’t know maybe my AC3 unit is faulty or the 5dbi antenna isn’t suitable for my setup. I’m using it in my 2 bedroom house and AC2 have stronger wifi signals in every corner compared to AC3. I’m using ROS 7.11 for both.
So, no. You don’t have to upgrade. If you want to upgrade, go to hAP AX2 or AX3, the wifi 6 will surely give you better performance.
in my 2 bedroom house and AC2 have stronger wifi signals in every corner compared to AC3
No surprise here. The higher (??? actually almost identical) 5dBi antenna gain, is an improvement of the received signal for the hAP ac3 from the weak client devices, as the transmitted signal in most cases is limited by country/region regulations, to exactly the same value for both devices. The regulator limit applies to the peak direction only! So in the limiting by regulator case , then the overall wireless energy transmitted by the device with the higher antenna gain is lower than the overall wireless energy of the device with the lower antenna gain.
These antenna are passive devices, the overall wireless energy all comes from the radio TX power, which in those regulator limited cases will be forced to a lower value , with higher antenna gain.
Indoor, is not easy, what is the value of the directional amplification, if the transmission path is unknown? Those so called omnidirectional (!?) antenna of the hAP ac3/ ax3 are directional in the 5 Ghz band, not omnidirectional around the physical antenna. (both for ttansmission and reception).
But as indicated, the stronger signal received from the AP is not the way to evaluate the benefites of an antenna (gain)