802.11ac 'Gigabit Wi-Fi' Starts To Show Potential, Limits 101
alphadogg writes "Vendor tests and very early 802.11ac customers provide a reality check on 'gigabit Wi-Fi' but also confirm much of its promise. Vendors have been testing their 11ac products for months, yielding data that show how 11ac performs and what variables can affect performance. Some of the tests are under ideal laboratory-style conditions; others involve actual or simulated production networks. Among the results: consistent 400M to 800Mbps throughput for 11ac clients in best-case situations, higher throughput as range increases compared to 11n, more clients serviced by each access point, and a boost in performance for existing 11n clients."
Re:Why not properly implement 802.11n first? (Score:5, Informative)
802.11ac will probably suffer the same fate. The minimum implementation to get the "wireless ac" sticker on the box is going to be what half to three quarters of the devices on the market will support, even 10 years from now.
Every technology will suffer the same fate. Look, the problem isn't the technology, but noise pollution. The noise floor across the whole of the RF spectrum is rising by an average of 1db a year. That means that every three years, the 'room' gets twice as loud. Every new technology we roll out, every new device, is just another nail in that coffin. Like every other natural resource, humans just consume and consume, gorging themselves to excess until eventually there's nothing left.
In the 1930s, a single AM broadcast tower could cover most of a region in the US in the evening. Certain frequencies carried a worldwide range, albeit due to the unpredictable nature of the ionosphere, you never knew just where in the world your low power signal would land. They did this using spark gap radios and shit with vaccum tubes in it. Today, the same feat can only be achieved with DSPs because the noise floor has come up so much most of the signal is trash after only a couple hundred miles.
Cell phone companies are continually trying to keep up with ever denser concentrations of towers; And it's not because of data-thirsty hipster iphones... it's because a few hundred milliwatts barely gets you across the street anymore. It's a regulatory nightmare just finding a spot for a new tower and getting it approved... and companies fall farther behind every year on meeting coverage goals.
We aren't just sucking up bandwidth on a per-frequency basis... every radio device contributes to global noise. Our RF spectrum is dying the death of a thousand papercuts. And all of this we can blame on two things; A complete lack of government coordination to share bandwidth and unify technologies using something like SDR across all wireless devices, brought on by competition by various companies to be the last man standing at the auctions and with technology able to "scream" just a little bit louder than the competition through a dizzying array of RF engineering cheats to increase effective broadcast power in a way the FCC can't penalize.
Your tax dollars at work people.
Re:Stability? (Score:4, Informative)
Switch to 5GHz and you should see an improvement
Combined with further reduction in range. With an ASUS N56U, in the middle of nowhere with no interference, 2.4GHz becomes unreliable at around 700ft. 5GHz drops out somewhere around 450ft.
Re:Why not properly implement 802.11n first? (Score:5, Informative)
In the 1930s, a single AM broadcast tower could cover most of a region in the US in the evening.
That's because back in the 1930s, AM stations like WLW were operating at half a megawatt.