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Apple Clarifies 802.11g Controversy
Wireless Spider writes "A couple of days ago there was a controversy over the 802.11g data rates and supposed changes in IEEE specification. Apple has clarified this controversy, stating that nothing has changed in the spec. It seems the article from Computerworld was somewhat misleading. Quote from an Apple Vice President: "802.11g is still a 54Mbit/sec standard," Bell told MacCentral. "802.11b is 11Mbit/sec, but your actual throughput is somewhere between 4 and 5-1/2Mbit/sec. The number that's quoted is the data rate that's used between the radios (raw data rate, which includes the protocols etc.)" After reading this article featured on Macworld, 802.11g transfer rate controversy meaningless, says Apple, it seems clear that the people at Computerworld didn't do their homework for the article featured on May 22. Also, there seems to be a lot of politics between 802.11g and a supporters, and that every article posted on the Internet about this subject might not be true, or could be politically motivated."
Wow, if this isn't news for nerds I don't know what is.
I just, 5 minutes before this article popped up, showed a friend of mine the previous slashdot article saying that 802.11g's 54mbps is not-so. Damn contradictory news services! *shakes fist*
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
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Reporters that don't do there homework and slashdot editors that don't check the facts before posting? What is this the New York Times?
After reading the article, I did a quick search for 802.11g throughput tests and 802.11a/b tests. I came up with two links:
Tom's Hardware 802.11g throughput tests
ExtremeTech's 802.11a and 802.11b throughput tests
There's going to be overhead with any protocol, but I would expect that wireless would have a higher overhead than wired protocols. There's certainly a lot of things you have to take into consideration for wireless throughput - obstructions, distance, error correction.
Computerworld reports that the IEEE has changed the 100BaseT spec to only run at 65Mb/s not 100Mb/s as initially specified, thus slowing down millions of computers world-wide. Additionally gigabit ethernet has also been affected by the IEEE bringing many critical business systems down to a crawl.
The only people who look bad as a result of this are silly chipset vendors and the 54g collaboration of idiots who put products on the market based loosely on the draft since now all their logos look stupid.
...or just a play on words with "Jobs" and "Wozniak"? :) Hell, if I had a name like that I would also be promoted to president of hardware product marketing.
You could just summarize the sentence as:
"Every article posted on the Internet might not be true, or could be politically motivated."
And it'd be even closer to the truth.