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First 802.11n Products Breaking Out
capt turnpike writes "If you're hooked up to a fat pipe, but want mobility, it looks like the new 802.11n standard might have some promise. eWEEK.com got their hands on some of the upcoming products and put the new devices through their paces." From the article: "The 802.11n task group is aware of the current draft's issues with legacy wireless LAN devices (specifically with how 802.11n shares bandwidth with attached legacy clients), and representatives from Cisco and Motorola broke off to look into the issues before the next meeting of the draft subcommittee, which is scheduled for May. Expectations vary widely, depending on whom you talk to. In previous conversations with Dave Borison, Airgo's director of product marketing, we leaned that Airgo is not making chip sets based on the draft standard because the company thinks the issue of legacy interoperability is significant enough to necessitate small modifications to the silicon."
From the article:
We also found that Linksys' draft 802.11n router caused performance issues with legacy 802.11g networks.
AND:
The current draft of the 802.11n standard was approved for letter ballot in March; the full standard is expected to be ratified by the second quarter of 2007.
AND:
With this uncertainty in mind, it is not advisable to invest in these products lock, stock and barrel. Enterprise-grade WLAN manufacturers continue to wait for the standard to fully bake, and enterprise customers should do the same.
For the record, I think regardless if it's called pre-N or "draft 802.11n", it is still isn't the final product... so beware what you buy.
Funnypics
If you're hooked up to a fat pipe, but want mobility I was under the impression that immobility was the desired effect of a fat pipe...
.... but maybe the prudent thing to do is wait and see how these new products behave in the real world. Early indications are that there are "issues" as described in the articles below:
, 39020348,39265307,00.html ?articleID=186700327
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/wireless/0
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtm
http://wifinetnews.com/archives/006507.html
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
As for buying in advance, one also hopes that firmware upgrades will allow early adopters to conform to the final spec. when it's released. Does anyone know which manufacturers are better or worse at providing effective firmmware patches in this regard?
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I realize I'll probably get modded down for suggesting this, but why don't you guys just set up a wired LAN? You all probably are plugging power cords in, so there's already a bit of a cable tangle. If you all plug into a wired network, you won't have nearly as many lag/interference problems.
This guy's the limit!
"... whom you talk to."
Either use "to whom you talk" or "who you talk to", but don't half-assed try to make yourself look English compliant when you just end up butchering the language.
Why in the world would you buy a "Pre-N" router? You need a compatible card and router, which is not cheap, and will probably be incompatible.
The title is also decieving;
"The current draft of the 802.11n standard was approved for letter ballot in March; the full standard is expected to be ratified by the second quarter of 2007."
So anything you buy will not work with what you buy when it's fully ratified. Pre-g, anyone?
"During eWEEK Labs' tests, Linksys products based on Version 1.0 of the 802.11n draft standard were indeed fast--faster than anything we've tested to date--but issues with range and interference with legacy wireless networks show room for improvement."
Speed may be important, but reliability is more important. Most internet connections aren't even close to that fast, and if it doesn't have range or reliability, why would you use it on a LAN?
Gamers, who would benifit from this, use wired mice for similar reasons; batteries don't die in wired mice, no lag, no problems. Same reasons that they wouldn't use 802.11n: If 802.11n can't deliver reliability, why use it?
And backwards compatibility? That's one of the most important points of all! Sheesh.
How is this different from the "Pre N" devices of a year or so ago?
OH! It's CLOSER to what the N standard will be.
Are Linksys and the like SO desperate for a new shiny to dangle that they'll make products that may or may not be compatible with the standard?
I'll stick with my 802.11g thank you. Let me know when I have a need to bother with upgrading.
The ever obligatory...
Great, I just bought X type product and now they come out with something newer to screw us into spending more money. Someone wake me when they stop this nonsense so I can buy one last product and die in peace!
Says:
Is it true? Article seems to not have the word "distance" (yes, I am too busy to read it).
2) what was the outcome of the previous 802.11g competing candidates? I remember the times when there were plenty of "g" on the shelves, yet no standard. How screwed were people who bought "g" in pre-standard times?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Please leave my fat pipe out of this...
Ohhh! Pay Dirt! A pair of half-eaten choco-pants!
Distance graph comparison
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
"The ending of a sentence with a preposition is a practice up with which I will not put." - Guess who said it?
The Belkin Wireless Pre-N (F5D8230-4) Router (F5D82304) has been out since October 2004, and gets good reviews at epinions.com
Sir Winston Churchill.
Wow... you just burnt karma to FP a 802.11n story.
... get really fcuked off if you use it within 15 miles of an airport.
Causes WAY too much intereference with planes, init.
I agree, with so many devices with built in wireless g adapters, it would be foolhardy to buy anything until after a standard is ratified and proven to be flawlessly backward compatible.
As much of a fan as I am of the new hotness, I don't think I'll be giving up old and busted anytime soon in this respect. At least not in my place of business.
It's already too easy for the IT guy to catch hell for stuff in the office without manufacturers delivering unpolished products. Problem is with this kind of thing, is when an order comes down from higher up to implement the new hotness without regards to it's standards compliance, your kinda screwed. I could give significantly less than one shit about the gaming considerations. In my opinion it's downright irresponsible to release products at this point. I Just hope that the devices that are being released can be brought into standards compliance once it has been ratified, by a firmware update.
"Let's beta test this product, but make people pay for it" is what this amounts to..
... what did you expect, something profound?
Did anyone notice that the numbers are not very impressive? The Asus Wireless G had 85% of the throughput of the Linksys WRT300N, and much better range degradation. I think that Linksyss claim of 4X the range and 12X the speed of other G class hardware falls flat on its face!
Are you serious? Ok if we are talking laptops I'd agree. But for desktops (which the average gaming machine is). Wired is the way to go. Why sacrifice speed for a very small convience.
Yeah, a "horsed carriage" that's ~20x as fast (gigabit) as those new-fangled "horseless" whirligigs (802.11g). If that metaphor was valid, Henry Ford would be remembered only by his neighbors as that crazy anti-semite down the street with the slow contraption that never cought on.
I'm still using 802.11b at my house... we have Verizon DSL and it maxes out at about 400 kB/s down, 50 kB/s up. 802.11b seems to be more than enough for my needs. Obviously, I'd buy 802.11g if I were getting new stuff, but I don't know why it's something to get my panties in a twist over.
Why exactly are people so excited by faster wireless networking when very few of them actually HAVE the "fat pipes" to connect to. Is there ANY residential cable/DSL service that actually exceeds the capacity of 802.11g?
My bicyles
Guess who said it?
Ummmm, nobody? .
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
Um, WLANs suck ass for gaming. Latency can spike easily if someone turns on the microwave. If you're going to play games, you'll be less frustrated using a wired LAN.
Grandparent is obviously a drug subculture post, not a homosexual subculture post...
Power goes from you to the local outlet. If you're having a bigger LAN party, then you could be connecting to somebody in a different room, or on a different floor. Every room will have power, but not every room is necessarily going to be wired to the master ethernet switch, and crossing floors is even more of a pain in the butt.
Hideous. What is that, a radar dish on the middle? Do they seriously want me to put that in my house? Were do I find enough clearance for the radar dish to rotate?
Uhmm... the US currency is not tied to any material (gold, silver, etc) item. And it hasn't been for quite some time. Did you pay attention in your history classes?
agreed, also a horseless is more expensive, breaks down, requires gas and repairs, and is way more dangerous. If you're going to try to actually get somewhere, you'd be better off using a horsed carriage.
When cars were first introduced, they were way slower and far less reliable than a horse carrage. Perhaps a better rebuttle would have been, that wired networks may be a "horse carrage", but we are in the "late 1800's" of networking
"Guess who said it?"
You did.
Is it my turn now?
I realize I'll probably get modded down for asking this, but what exactly is wrong with an 802.11g LAN session? The latency has never been an issue for me.
May the Maths Be with you!
I am actually pretty satisfied with the speed of my 'G' system I would rather they would have focused their efforts on 'reliable speed at a DISTANCE' (without having to erect a GIANT antenna, boosters, etc...)
A.K.A I want 'G' speeds 5-15 miles out.
Frankly, 802.11 is more than good enough for me on the bandwidth front. The problems with 802.11 to me are the per-wap RANGE.
When does 802.16 / wimax actually hit market for real? I want a wireless protocol robust enough it can be realistically used for ISPs. I'm sick of being alternately gouged by cable and dsl companies for service which isn't as good as what I got 10 years ago as a dialup customer.
Not so. Look up typhoid rates, and the cause in the 19th century urban world.
And it was because of bad disposal of waste from humans and created by human activities. Germ theory took a while to be accepted in the 19th centruy and people did not want to levy taxes for sanitary disposal of sewage and garbage. That is assuming they understood the meaning of sanitary. Mind you a lot of people in the modern world still do not understand the meaning of sanitary.
Don't forget horseshoes and a yolk.
Uhhh...
The "Pre-N" stuff floating around is all Airgo manufactured. The Airgo design differs from the 802.11n draft, and I suspect that's what this is really all about.
Airgo has a *LOT* to lose by not getting the standard changed in their favor. They put all their eggs in one basket on this one... and the IEEE didn't go with their solution.
I'd take anything that comes out of an interview with somebody who works for Airgo with a healthy dose of salt...
It sounds like they're spreading FUD about the IEEE draft because they're upset that their gear isn't compatible with it... I doubt the real concern is of backwards compatibility with existing gear.
From Distributing Music Over Telephone Lines (Telephony, December 18, 1909, pages 699-701):Now let's try your argument in refutation: "Symphony over radio? Maybe for a portable (battery-powered) radio, but if your radio is going to be plugged in, symphony over telephone wires makes much more sense. No tuning, no interference, etc etc."
Granted, for historical reasons this analogy is of course weaker, since symphony over telephone wires did not vastly predate symphony over radio, it was not of much higher quality and lower latency in a typical reception scenario, etc. But you get the idea.
P.S. Your speed issue is just a matter of tuning to five, ten, fifteen, twenty radio stations, however many you need to get as much music as you want, in the analogy. Whereas adding another telephone line for each additional bandwidth multiplier (say you want to listen to ["download"] five different symphonies at a time) is a different proposition indeed! At the end of the day, any cable, be it power, USB, ethernet, a keyboard cable, whatever, is going to only carry signal between two points, which you must manually walk from source to destination (somebody needs to plug in both ends), it is going to be fixed length (even if you're close, in which case the lines just looks like a jumbly mess, and if you're a tad too far, too bad), and of course cost pretty much proportional to its length, which does not hold true for increasing wireless gain. Imagine how much a satellite dish costs compared with an equal distance in some kind of cable, nevermind how you connect it with its destination. A wireless solution does not require a human to manually set the exact point that is at each end, it is not of fixed length, it does not take up physical space, and, therefore, multiplying the number of these signals looks nothing like multiplying the number of ethernet lines.
I realize we're not quite where we need to be on the wireless front, but that's what the article is about, and, after all, neither was the horseless carriage when introduced.
I'm sorry but what is the point of having a 100mbs connection to your router via wired if your internet connection isn't actually that fast. My wireless at 54mbs is still faster than my broadband connection so having an uber 1337 wired connection wouldn't really benefit me, and I expect that alot of other people are in the same boat as me, I don't think in the UK at least you can even purchase broadband faster than 30mbs.
I have to use 802.11g on my desktop because it's upstairs and I don't feel like running cables through the walls - I play games on it regularly have never had a single issue with performance. There is always 1 and sometimes as many as 3 other 802.11 networks overlapping and on occasion the microwave gets used while I am gaming. The only thing that ever caused a noticeable degradation of signal strength was my 2.4ghz phone - even with the lowered signal strength though my latency was completely fine, my total bandwidth dropped a little (i.e. if I had a download going at 300k/s it would drop down to 200k/s until the phone was turned off) - actual pings in games were never noticeably effected. Comparing ping times from before and after I moved (i.e. wired and then wireless) there is absolutely no difference.
Why in the hell do you have six ethernet lines running out of a single computer? What are you doing that requires more than 1 line from the server and 1 line from each computer going directly to a 10/100/1000 switch? Get some velcro cable ties and the "jumble of wires" practically goes away.
I don't know any gamer in their right mind who would choose wireless over wired.
Don't leave out the albumen (if you want to bring egg parts into the mix). Maybe a yoke could be used to attached the horse and the egg to the buggy? :)
six ethernet lines means 6000 megabits, of course. :)
My sisters boyfriend has a setup similar to yours except that everytime someone picks up the phone, his signal is dropped completely. He use to be downstairs (the DSL line and switch are on the 2nd floor) and that would happen all the time. I offered to run a cable down to the room (there was already a cable in the room above him, which use to be my room), but my dad insisted that wireless would be fine and that he probably just needed a new wireless card (that part turned out to be true).
Fast forward a couple of years. He's now upstairs, in my old room, and my dad was still saying that he can just use the wireless. There's a cable, IN THE CLOSET, 15 feet from his computer, but "it won't look as good". Finally, last night, I took the cable and pushed it under the carpet and ran it to his computer. The only piece you can see is where it goes to his computer and where it comes out from the floor into the closet. I was going to run it down the wall and put in a real jack, but it gets hot in the attic (I won't run cable in the summer, that's how hot it gets).
Now he doesn't have to deal with anymore dropped connections since he has a wired connection now. The only place in the house that doesn't have those problems is the family room and kitchen. Of course, they're not in a direct line from the 2.4 GHz phone to the WAP, so that's probably why they work fine. The point is that a wireless connection doesn't work for everyone (I changed channels on the wireless card several times with no luck and it had to be set for "auto" wireless speed or it just wouldn't work). I recently bought a 5.8 GHz cordless phone for this exact reason.
Anywhere I can run cables, I do it, whether it's "convenient" or not.
They were talking LAN party. Internet connection isn't the point. Within a LAN, be it a gaming LAN or office network LAN. I've never seen a reason to sacrifice overall network speed for desktop users for wireless. (Aside from the cost savings of not running hardlines to every office)
Of course you can. The router supports n devices--have you taken ANY math?
didnt boter to RTFA, but one thing I wonder: will linksys help with adoption of 802.11n and provide most people with free networking like before? brings a whole new definition to "First 802.11n Products Breaking Out" :)
buffers
There is shared bandwidth among associated stations, enourmous overhead in the sessions, and the possibility for easy interference. I've seen wireless keyboards that will screw up 802.11b/g links, in addition to microwaves, phones, handheld radios, other 802.11b/g networks, etc. Alos, performance degrades with link load.
As an example, at my house I can't reliably watch an xvid movie across 802.11g. I get excellent signal, a 54Mbps link, and low latency. That is, I get those until I try to watch a movie, and then the latency get quite unbearable.
So basically, 802.11g is fine for browsing, copying data, and similar, but it is nowhere near reliable enough for gaming, and it doesn't provide reliablity or bandwidth sufficient for new LAN games.
I have a wireless N router, and it ALSO does g and b, so don't have a cow :P
We play at a dozen different locations. Sometimes wire is the way. Sometimes it is simply impractical.
Funnypics
In the year 2000: Dell: "Essentially, Dell was responsible for selecting, if not necessarily developing, many of the technologies in today's desktop computers and servers. Among standards for which he said Dell deserves credit are 802.11 wireless networking"
You serious? You know there are other reasons for routers besides linking one computer to the net through a DSL connection. Internet speed is but one of many concerns when purchasing a router. Some of us use multiple computers and move multi gigabyte files between the computers. Try doing that with an "11mb" 802.11b connection... Then try it with 54mb 802.11g, then try it with a 100mb wire or even 1gb wire... Instead of hours to move so mething from room to room, it takes a couple minutes. That's why it's so important for a 802.11n to be cross compatible.
If I'm sitting in my car outside of someone's house I want to be able to get all of their mp3's before they notice I'm sitting their with my laptop. As it is now, 54mb/s takes WAY TO LONG to download an mp3 collection from an unsecured network.
Funnypics
Yoda
Yes- but you also need a N/pre-N wireless card for your laptop. Some friends have these, and were very disappointed when performance with their old 802.11g cards was... the same.
http://blog.grcm.net/
I paid plenty of attention in history classes; but something like what standard {if any} other countries' currencies were pegged to would have been more likely to have cropped up in geography than history, and I dropped that subject after the third year.
Yeah and what happens when someone thinks it's a good idea to microwave a snack while chatting on a 2.4GHz cordless phone during the middle of some intense 802.11g/n gaming? Say goodbye to your packets!
A crude form of mesh networking?
Look as good? I think what your Dad meant was 'I know that cable is better but that might affect the resale value'.
Perhaps you don't understand.
He thinks different.
Apart from what others said (p2p between PCs on the network), I'm still using an old 11Mbit WAP (yes, quite old) and from my bedroom I get shitty signal quality. Even right next to the router, the best I can pull is ~5Mbit. My connection has been 8Mbit down for some time now, and more recently, it's gone up to 24Mbit. My internet speed is severely crippled by wireless. This pre-N stuff is also very expensive - I'll need to get a new router and a new wireless card for each computer. I'm just going to get my bedroom wired, should keep me up to speed for a while yet.
It's just in the same state of flux that this N specifiction is..
You can buy wimax distribution systems now, alvarion has one, navini has one, but the problem is that they're based on a protocol that isn't finished. In the meantime, have a look at hiperLan gear, it's not half bad, for the meantime.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
You realise that part made you sound like an idiot, right? Just checking.
--- Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
(n/t)
Some people can tell the difference between 30ms and 60ms.
Others can't.