Many users have abandoned the use of a single router in favor of a mesh network in recent years. A mesh design, with many access points from which a user can receive a signal as they move around, can provide more comprehensive coverage in large households. This typically boosts signal strength throughout the remote reaches of a home or other regions where a single router may struggle due to walls and distance. MSI has now developed a solution to this challenge that employs a single access point. It’s a router with dynamically rotating antennas that can track a device in real time. If you turned a corner, for example, its antennas might turn on their own to keep the signal targeted at you.
According to Engadget, MSI’s RadiX BE22000 Turbo will not be available until 2024. That’s partly because it’s a Wi-Fi 7 device, and we won’t have Wi-Fi 7 devices for a while. Currently, the vast majority of routers on the market support Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6e.
The RadiX BE22000 Turbo has four extremely long antennae that give it a Star Wars vibe, much more so than earlier routers with a plethora of antennas. Each antenna has its own motor that allows it to swivel horizontally to adjust the signal’s direction. This is identical to the Archer AXE200 Omni router shown at CES 2022 by TP-Link. That type, too, had four rotating antennae that could move horizontally and vertically. It doesn’t appear that router ever made it out of the lab though, as it’s not listed on TP-Link’s website.
Watching the footage of it in action, it’s evident that it’s still a work in progress. The antennae appear to move erratically. Many corporations exhibit cutting-edge technology at CES solely to garner attention. Some tests would be required to determine whether rotating antennas enhanced connection speed over static antennas. MSI claims that the antennae can “dynamically determine clients’ location,” but we’re curious how it would favor certain customers over others. In every household, you can easily have more than ten devices connected at the same time, but perhaps the router’s software allows you to manually prioritize devices. Or perhaps it can detect when a gadget is moving and simply maintain its signal locked on that one.
Aside from the innovative antennas, MSI claims the router has four times the bandwidth of Wi-Fi 6 routers. This is owing to Wi-Fi 7’s 320MHz channels on the 6GHz frequency, which are twice as large as the 160MHz channels on the 5GHz band. It provides up to 22Gb/s of bandwidth, which is more than double what was previously available. Finally, Wi-Fi 7 supports Multi-Link Operation (MLO), which allows a single client to use multiple radios simultaneously to increase performance. The router has two 10Gb ports and four 2.5Gb connections, implying that if it ever goes on sale, it will be rather pricey.
