The Future of 802.11ac 125
CowboyRobot writes "The 802.11ac standard is expected to be ratified in 2013 and NetworkComputing has an interview with representatives of Cisco Systems and Aerohive Networks about what that will mean for everyone else. 'Out of the gate, the increases in performance over 11n will not be tremendously impressive. The second wave--which will require a hardware refresh--gets far more interesting... First-generation 802.11ac products will achieve up to 1.3 Gbps through the use of three spatial streams, 80-MHz-wide channels (double the largest 40 MHz channel width with 802.11n), and use of better hardware components that allow higher levels of modulation and encoding (up to 256-QAM). Whether we will actually see 802.11ac products capable of 6.9 Gbps is dependent on hardware enhancements on both the access point and client that are not certain.'"
Congestion & old nets = little benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
802.11ac isn't out yet but I have little hope of it really helping. I live in an apartment building I can already see 50+ routers on 2.4 & 10+ ON 5GH.
I just don't see that much of a benefit unless the congestion avoidance is really better than 102.11n.
Re:I'm a wire guy (Score:4, Insightful)
I've had just over 200 Mbit/s with 5 GHz 802.11n, sitting in the next room from the AP, with a wall between us.
And probably noone else using the 5 GHz band in your area - am I right? Because as soon as the signal / noise ratio decreases the high efficiency modulations stop working and you must live with much lower spectral effifciency - that is' much lower usable bandwidth for the same slice of the spectrum.
Unfortunately increasing the transmission power doesn't help a lot - after all, the neighbour wants high bandwidth as well leading to an arms race.
Re:Not sure the big deal here... (Score:4, Insightful)
My somewhat extensive experience with mythtv and wireless is that you need speed to work around latency due to interference or random multipath or whatever it is that occasionally slows stuff down. If you've got 1000 mb to transfer over 1000 seconds then on average you only need average speed X. However if you need to transfer exactly 1 mb every second, or the picture breaks up, and you occasionally endure 9/10ths of a second interference/outages, then you need 10 times the average speed to deliver. Or a bigger buffer, which means a long spooling up delay.
A good IT analogy is its like the difference between batch processing and a realtime OS.
Or maybe a standard /. car analogy is something like if you've got a 200 mile range gas tank, it doesn't really matter where the gas station is as long as its less than 200 miles away when you have a full tank... but the instant that the closest open gas station is 201 miles away, you're all done. Maybe thats an awful analogy...
No wait I've got a better car analogy. My gas station can deliver something like 5 gallons per minute, which seems like gross overkill for my fuel injectors which barely burn 2 gallons per hour on the highway. However the key point is my fuel injectors do NOT use 2 gallons per hour, they really use a microscopic droplet 60 times per second. Or something like that. Too early in the morning...