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Airgo Quadruples Wi-Fi Limit
QED writes "Airgo Networks, a privately held maker of wireless networking components, said on Wednesday it has developed chips that will increase the Wi-Fi speed limit by a factor of four.
The Palo Alto, California-based company, which designs its chipsets around Multiple Input and Multiple Output (MIMO), a wireless technique that uses different radio channels to improve both speed and transmission quality, said it has achieved data rates up to 240 megabits per second (Mbps)... "
... I need better distance and fewer signal dropouts. I'm not talking about all that far distances either, just 200-300 feet inside an office building with many sheetrock walls and twisty hallways.
So, in other words, they've developed a chipset that will allow a router/WAP + WLAN card to use multiple channels at once...
Not only is that not -really- upping the bandwidth limit (they just got more signals, not a bigger throughput per signal), it seems to me that it'd blast out 1/3 - 1/2 of the avaialble spectrum within range for wireless.....which means if you buy one and are in an apartment/city/whatever, you could be a real jackass to your neighbors simply by using it...
Wow. Ok, I'm not great on the conversions, but isn't 240 megabits/second = 30 megaBytes per second? If that's really the case, I don't think data can even be written to my hard drive that fast. Wow.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Wireless will continue to improve indefinitely, and is likely to retain a degree of backward compatability. Like any developing technology, you should ask yourself what's going to be useful to you for the next few years, and adopt it.
If you had made this decision four years ago, decided 802.11b was "right for you", and bought 802.11b cards, you'd still be in the position today that you can find compatable, cheap, equipment that'll suit your needs.
The only case where there's no direct backwards compatability is for 802.11a, and that's because 'a' works on a different frequency. But you can buy 802.11abg WAPs, they're a little more expensive than regular WAPs, but once you have your WAP, you can buy any equipment you need to go with it. Additionally, nothing stops you from buying additional WAPs implementing different standards in the future (they can all connect to the same Ethernet network)
Long term, you may increasingly have to replace equipment anyway. Your 486 probably will not run Windows XP. But the 486 will still work, still run 95 and GNU/Linux, and all the other things it did when you bought it. Likewise, your 802.11a WAP will still allow all the machines you bought 802.11a cards for to use your network. If they become scarce, you can think about buying a newer WAP, and have your newer hardware use that.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.