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802.11n: High Throughput, Not Just Fast Wireless
eggboard writes "Unstrung reveals that the 802.11 working group is spawning 802.11n, a high-throughput task group to work on increasing the actual data:symbol ratio in wireless networks while also boosting speed to 108 Mbps to 320 Mbps. Most people who use 802.11a, b, or g know that actual net throughput, or the real data that's carried, is a fraction of the cited rate: maybe 7 Mbps in the 11 Mbps 802.11b flavor and 25 Mbps in the 54 Mbps a and g flavors. The goal of 802.11n is to increase speed, sure, but also to increase the percentage of symbols that don't bear overhead. The bad news: they predict 2005 or 2006 for completion."
I'm glad someone is focusing on the overhead and efficiency of the standards and not just trying to get something out there with a big unrealistic marketable speed. I guess comparing advertised Mbps on wireless devices could be like comparing MHz for CPUs by different companies.
If you take a look at the 802.11 spec from 1999, you'll see a lot of stuff there that is spec'd for backwards compatibility. For example, there is the PS-Poll exchange grafted atop the normal powersave-state protocol. A lot of this backwards compatibility is at the cost of performance. A "design-from-scratch" approach could result in a much more efficient data-networking protocol design that incorporates what has been learned in the last ten years or so. However, much of the IEEE process is subject to internecine politics and hidebound practices. I am hopeful but not too optimistic.
Have they taken into consideration that they might run out of letters at some point? ..especially if we skip from g to n.. there's some cool letters in there...