The Coming Time for 802.11a?

abhikhurana writes " This article on 80211-planet.com predicts a real boom in the market for 802.11a in the coming year. An excerpt from the article: In tests in my SOHO LAN, I found that in real world conditions, 802.11a averaged four times faster than 802.11b. In addition, with its 5GHz frequency, 802.11a avoids the interference slow-downs that b must suffer with microwave ovens, high-end wireless phones, and other 802.11b networks. Also makes an interesting read for knowing about the technologies which maybe driving the wireless bandwagon in the coming years."

Comments

Switching Over

[Oculus Habent]

Fresh starters may be more inclined to adopt faster, "cleaner" wireless, but the push will be moving people from 802.11b - having incompatible networks makes buying decisions harder...

Though some will probably opt for both, as many businesses use b, and won't want to spend the money to replace all the cards in all the laptops.

I wonder when Apple will produce 802.11a cards, and if they'll support a & b.

Re:Switching Over

[monkeydo]

The transition is much easier with wireless. You just put in an 802.11a base station next to your .11b base stations. For new clients you buy .11a cards. There is absolutely no need for a single base station to do both. since they are on different freqs you just put them next to each other. Your normal "technology refresh" on the clients and eventually all of your 802.11b is gone. Do it as quickly or as slow as you like.

How long ?

[Anonymous Coward]

How long should I wait to get wireless? I don't want to get trapped in an upgrade loop, like I've been in with computers.

Since '92 I've just been happy to stay 1-2 generations behind to keep the cost down.

802.11b is good enough

[joshv]

I think we have reached the 'good enough' point with wireless networking. 802.11b is faster than any internet connection I will have in the forseeable future, and performs perfectly well for the small day to day file transfers over the LAN. It doesn't work for large file transfers, but when I need to do those, I pull out the Wi-Fi card, walk the laptop over to the hub, and plug a spare cable into it's ethernet port.

I won't be upgrading until there is a compelling reason, and I can't see there being one for at least the next 3-5 years.

-josh

Poster mentions 802.11a, but...

[Nomad7674]

...the article also mentions 802.11g, which is more likely to become the standard for the vast majority of users. It is backwards compatible with the Apple Airports and Linksys wireless routers that are making so many inroads into homes and small businesses. Why pay a premium to upgrade everything to 802.11a when with 802.11g you can upgrade the router first and then the cards one at a time as money makes itself available? This option also allows for the largest compatibility for visitors - inmportant in public places like coffee bars and airports which are already adopting wireless standards for customers.

That is my two cents. Of course, the big variable is when 802.11g recieves finalized specs. 802.11a is already there.

One more question for the grou: I have read a lot (for a Business Analyst) about wireless networking and have yet to see a place which explains the "lettering system" used by the 802.11 products. Why are a, b, and g given those names? Are there 802.11c and d awaiting consideration?

And how long....

[Andy Dodd]

Until the 5 GHz band becomes just as crowded as 2.4?

802.11a is not the wave of the future. It's going to be a nice for those hardcore who absolutely need obscene speed and live in an interference-prone environment.

It has to compete against the HUGE installed base of 11b hardware that is *far cheaper* than 11a and is more than adequate for 90% of the people out there.

I was thinking of upgrading to 11a since I happen to be a power user - But that means that the card I bought would be useless on most networks I might roam to (such as my former college's wireless network). In the end, 11b won out because:
a) I already had some 11b equipment
b) My parents had 11b equipment
c) I have never had problems with 11b interference - Spread spectrum is pretty resistant to CW interference (Microwave ovens - People could run microwaves all they want in my apartment and I wouldn't notice any difference on my network.) and 900 MHz analog is "good enough" for me in the cordless phone arena, which means that the most famous 802.11b interference culprit (2.4 GHz phones) isn't present.
d) 11b hardware was a helluva lot cheaper than 11a hardware.

Bringing down the price

[AirLace]

A 10 mbit 802.11a can cost as much as a gigabit NIC, which isn't too favourable if you're not going to do much roaming. The fact that you have to buy several Wi-Fi cards to get a wireless network together makes the proposition daunting for homes and small businesses. It doesn't have to be fast (or even secure, that's what ipsec is for), but for the technology to become truly ubiquitous, it needs to be priced at commodity levels, say around £10 to £15.

Personally I'm hedging my bets on systems that offload most of the processing to the host CPU like the stuff Microsoft is working on. It allows not only for cheaper hardware, but also gives more flexibility and upgradability (care to upgrade your Wifi setup to 100mbit with a software update?) The only thing that could potentially go wrong with this technology is if Microsoft tries to abuse its position and fails to release open specs for the hardware or releases proprietary (or no) drivers for non-Windows operating systems. However, given their commitment to FreeBSD it's quite possible that they'll go ahead and release some BSD-licensed reference drivers for FreeBSD which can be ported to other architectures.

Speed Doesn't Affect Home Usability; Distance Does

[billstewart]

For the home user, the speed of a wireless connection doesn't affect usability - your connection to the outside world is probably DSL or cable modem, usually not more than 1.5Mbps, so even if you only get 2Mbps out of your wireless, it's fast enough. (Also, the last time I had a 1.1Mbps DSL connection, I found that my end was almost always faster than the other end; the only way to fill it was to download more than ~10Mbps from a really big server.) Sometimes you might be doing big file transfers between different machines in your house, but most people don't do that very often, except for backups where speed doesn't matter - the video stuff that vendors are using to say that you should buy their products isn't really widespread, especially since DVD players for PCs are cheap enough that the difference in price between 802.11a and 802.11b can buy you an extra DVD drive.

Distance affects usability, of course - if the thing can't talk from the living room to the bedroom, that's a problem. But speed isn't enough to justify the extra cost for most home users.

Business is a different matter - there you often have enough machines sharing a server in the same building that total bandwidth matters.