Intel's 802.11A Wireless: 5x Faster

Jaben writes: "Intel today released the first 802.11A wireless LAN devices which offer more than a fivefold increase in speed over the current 802.11B. as soon as more devices get onto the market this new technology will really make wireless a possible alternative instead of a neat item to play with."

Comments

Mercedes-Benz rolls out drive-by Ethernet

[A Commentor]

From infoworld: Mercedes-Benz has 802.11a in a car... Interesting article even though it was 'rejected' by /.

Mercedes-Benz showcases a car of the near future with a built-in wireless Ethernet 802.11a connection that will capture high-speed bursts of data from roadside transceivers as the car hurtles down the highway.

Laptop speeds limited

[BarefootClown]

Glad somebody else has noticed this. I have an 802.11b network at home, and another at work; I use them to keep my (and my roommates') laptop(s) on the network without having to drag 100+ feet of Cat5 around the place. Do I feel limited by using "only" 11Mbps? Hell, no! I rarely break 1Mbps--on any network. I used to use a 100Mbps wired network, with a decent NIC in my laptop (3Com hardware NIC, not a WinNIC), a decent 100MBps switch, and still rarely broke 1Mbps, even with my desktop machines running closer to 50 Mbps. Why? In short, laptops suck. Seriously--when you're looking for performance, you don't look at laptops. The hard drives are much slower than anything in a desktop, the bus speeds are slower (my laptop has a 66MHz FSB; my desktop has a 133, with DDR RAM); everything is slower and scaled back. 11Mbps is no limit to a laptop, in my experience. It would be a limit to a desktop terminal connected to the WLAN, but most people/companies don't use wireless for desktops.

Granted, we could probably saturate the WLAN if we had twenty or so people all trying to pull large files, but that condition has its own flaws: 1) how often does the situation occur--even in a meeting, with 30 people attending, how many of them are trying to pull big files at a given time (usually none...), and 2) how many clients can an access point actually handle? Most of the ones with which I'm familiar (consumer equipment, admittedly) get flaky around 20-30 people; any more, and you need another AP--add another AP, and you effectively double the bandwitdh, as you're splitting the load across two different AP's, each on a different channels. Also remember than many networks are still only 10 Mbps, because of the high infrastructure cost of upgrading a major network (particularly if recabling is required); on such a network, the bit behind the AP is already the bottleneck, so it's not that big of a deal if the WLAN is only 11Mbps.

In short, yeah, it's neat, it's cool, but it's not that big of a deal, as long as laptops don't get a major bus upgrade. A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.

Re:better solution: same hardware

[edremy]

Up until very recently, I was using 802.11 cards, not 802.11a or 802.11b. These max out at 2mbs. Unless I was spooling a large print job or attempting to do a large LAN-based file transfer, I hardly noticed I only had 2mb of bandwidth available to me.

For a single person, 2Mbs might be ok. We've got the same solution, but instead of one person spooling a large print job, we've got 30 in a classroom attempting to download high resolution artwork. (No, not porn, unless you consider 13th century art porn.)

2Mbs is way, way too slow for this use, as we've painfully found out. We haven't even bothered with 11b, since we know we'll outgrow it way too fast. Until we can get an 11a solution wireless isn't an option here. I spent a lot of time talking to the Intel folks at EDUCAUSE a few weeks ago about what we need to roll it out...

Eric