CES 2012

While home theater enthusiasts may not have given much thought to routers and other home network devices in the past, it’s time we started to pay attention. Whether we are streaming a high definition movie from Vudu, or everyone in the house wants to stream to their own TVs, the router must be able to handle the demand. Netgear, Linksys, D-Link, and Belkin all showed new routers that are capable of streaming several high definition movies at the same time.

These routers offer 900 mbps (megabits per second) of combined WiFi speed so you can stream movies, play online games, and work on several computers or devices without the video slowing down and buffering or stuttering. Because the routers can transmit on two channels, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, you can use the 5 GHz channel for your high definition movie stream as there is less interference than on the crowded 2.4 GHz band and therefore better movie streaming performance.

If you want to stream High Definition movies from the internet, or from a media server in your home, these new routers can handle it wirelessly. The new routers will be available in spring and summer of 2012.