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802.11g Slows Down
Moosifer writes "Computerworld reports that in order to step on fewer 802.11b toes, the IEEE has reduced the actual throughput of 802.11g in its latest (and allegedly final) draft. I think I might keep old firmware on my linksys AP and card so that I can at least pretend I have faster gear." It's been moved from 54Mbps all the way down to 10-20Mbps, more than just a slight change.
This is the part where you begin to post the "802.11g is Dying" troll all across slashdot...
Hey, if it's going to be newer, more expensive, with very little increase in speed, what's the point?
Uhh, besides that, I'd be willing to bet most manufacturers will just say "screw it", and give their cards the full speed anyhow, standard be-dammed.
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This is huge. I work in wireless at a bug company and we're sending 802.11g gear out the door now. We're billing it at 54, but now we're going to have to tell everybody who already bought it, "Hey, we sold this at 54, but it can really only do 20! Sorry!"
This isn't going over well. People have been putting off 802.11a because they were waiting for 802.11g which was just as fast and had better range. Now they're left in the cold. I wonder what they're gonna do.
A lot of people have probably already invested a lot of money in 802.11g equipment because of the 54mbps rate, and now, if they have a mixed environment, will end up with a slower rate than they had with 802.11b (10mbps vs 11mbps). I guess this is the fault of the industry for making promises and shipping equipment before the standards are finalized, but this greatly shrinks the market for 802.11g upgrades.
[dons tin-foil hat] I wonder if the 802.11a proponents *ahem* persuaded the IEEE to do this because they might have lost a lot of invested time/money if 802.11g took over the world... [/tin-foil hat]
That upgrade appears to be for the cards based on the TI-ACX100 based cards. So you should be able to load these drivers on perhaps a DWL-650+ (the Dlink Airplus series cards)
The headline is more than a bit sensationalist; 802.11g still tops out at 54mbps. It's just that in a network with 802.11b equipment, it'll throttle back to 10-20Mbps. It's not quite as bad as you think it is, but you still may want to look at getting a 3rd party hardware solution. If you've got legacy equipment, you may want to consider picking up an 802.11a hub for your high speed equipment. I always thought that apple was silly by offering just 802.11g when all the chipset vendors have said that they're going to be offering combo solutions. Hell, a combo solution, used properly, can provide speeds of over 100Mbps. Someone's just got to create multilink support, much like the old trick of getting 2+ phone lines for dialup and using multilink PPP.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
802.11b's raw speed is 11Mb/s, actual thoroughput is only about 5 Mb/s. As far as I can tell, 802.11g's raw speed is still 54Mb/s, and even with the older "faster" firmware still actually had a throughput of ~20Mb/s, the only thing that's changed is the handling of mixed networks at 10Mb/s, which is still faster than 802.11b, just not the 4-5 times faster you'd expect.
The whole point of 802.11g is backwards compatibility. The only way to screw it is to use another frequency, and that's what 802.11a is for.
TS. It wasn't a ratified standard. Too bad. I mean seriously, if you implement non-standard systems, this is the price you pay. If you didn't point out to your customers that what you were selling them wasn't a ratified standard, then it's your butt in the sling when they complain.
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The encoding is at 54 Mbps: number of symbols per second, right? The throughput is the actual data rate that contains information exclusive of error correction and framing.
802.11g has produced 10 to 25 Mbps of throughput since they started working with 54 Mbps encodings.
This is a total misunderstanding, unfortunately, of both the article (which states the problem almost correctly) and its consequences.
Read any good article about 802.11g since it started shipping in draft form, and you'll see that a net throughput of 25 Mbps or less (much less in mixed b/g environments) was always what was produced.
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