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802.11n Delayed to 2008
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like we have to wait some more for 802.11n and promised 100 Mbps speeds. IEEE has delayed ratification of the standard until 2008, yet again, due to continuing problems with interoperability and too many comments from chipset manufacturers and other interested parties. Analysts are telling firms not to deploy n until the new standard is ratified."
for intel's upcoming Santa Rosa chipset? Isn't that supposed to have 802.11n built in?
This mus suck for all those people that already bough a 'n' standard wificard.
What! Don't tell me its true!
Because that is EXACTLY what everyone is dying for - A 100 mbps connection! It will pay all my bills (including its own) and automatically download all the rest of stupid things like.. I don't know.. food/clothes?
Manufacturers aren't waiting... They've been rolling it out for quite a while now, and will surely continue to do so, standard or no.
Delaying the standard for more than a year is only going to ensure that none of these systems will be interoperable, and certainly not forewards compatible.
An imperfect (slightly less backwards-compatible) standard now, would be much better than a perfect standard in 2 years.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Wireless is a convenience, in almost every case I've seen. Once you hit 11 Mb/s or double that at 22 Mb/s, what more do you need? How much bandwidth does reading email, surfing CNN, or running SSH require?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What will this mean for Apple's update to Airport Extreme/Express? This makes me a sad panda. :(
Sure it's saturday night - need a day off, clearly...
In layman's terms, WTF does this mean - seriously. Is it going to be available en masse and change the way I work from month-to-month project by project? There doesn't appear to be much information. In Australia I want really good wireless access from 'reasonable' areas of work and on the move. From the beach to the city and out to the suburbs. - when passign through the city, will the buildings and more importantly the tunnels affect my link. At what cost will this be available, and how is this gonna affect 3G/VoIP/ISP businesses.
Working from a boat would certainly do it.
I live in the mountains and I get my broadband from a small local provider who has a few inexpensive transmitters around town. A good solution for a small town.
I would really like to see universal coverage, and low bandwidth by throttling socket connections to keep people from abusing the system would be OK. There would still be a huge market for high speed wireless, cable, and fiber, but a backgound universal lower level of service system would be a good infrastructure investment.
Unfortunately, this is very unlikely to happen in the USA given our current political climate that subsidizes corporations and for political reasons needs to inhibit growth and prosperity of the middle class and small local businesses(just pointing out that the middle class is the largest threat to the republican dream of a 1000 year reich: permanent control).
Good. It's a bunch of monkey dust any way. I don't mean to sound trollish, but no one I know has an internet connection that can even deliver up to a solid 2-3MB/sec throughput. So, in theory, 802.11b @ 11MB/sec still hasn't even been TRULY maximized. And based on that principal, even @ 54MB/sec. We've got head room to build on for years before some thing like .11n even can be of any use to the average user.
.11n and WiMax. It's interesting to explain to people that it's not going to mean that as soon as you plug a card in to your machine, it's going to some how be miraculously, insanely faster. Because we all know we're still at the mercy of what the ISP has allocated/throttled back for your location.
... It's a hoax. Stop making people call us and asking about it.
We get a few questions regarding
Persoanlly speaking, working for a wireless company, we believe for the time being
Maximize what's currently in use before getting every one all excited about theoretical internet connections.
Just please make it work with Linux....
What is your point?
For some even electricity is considered a "convenience".
Intranet. Now you see why 100 Mgbt/s-1 and way up is interresting, attractive and sometimes NEEDED. Mileage may vary depending on application.
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Well it would help if you are copying large files over your internal network. Some things just call for gigabit ethernet, if you are transferring a ton of photos/music/video, but unless it's going to take hours, then I'm too lazy to plug in, and halving my transfer times would be nice...
-don
This is the sort of thing that could kill the NIC
Umm, excuse me, even wireless cards are NICs (Network Interface Cards.) NIC is going nowhere anytime soon.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If they wait too long, linksys' pre-ratification equipment could become a defacto standard. They've got high throughput equipment on the shelf today. I can go to staples right now and buy pretty darn good close to 802.11n speed equipment. By the time the standard is finalized I could have gotten a good 2 years out of their equipment. It may or may not work with competitor cards, but with such a lead my guess is any competitor is going to try and make it work with linksys' equipment rather than try to play catch up in market share.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
More delayed technology that the average consumer couldn't care less about. Mind you, I said AVERAGE COMSUMER. That means, all the kids with game consoles, all the middleaged people that have GeekSquad do everything for them. I guess that's the point where you become thankful that this got posted on a geek news website. Yet, somehow, I still don't care :\
Right now I am happy with using the 802.11g standard on my LAN but I can see the uses of higher bandwidth in the not so distant future for stuff such as as streaming HD Quality video from a cable box to PCs anywhere at home. I currently use a Slingbox to stream video to a single client at a time at 2Mbps. However, new devices such as the HAVA video streamer from Snappy are now on sale could do multicast streaming at up to 8 Mbps. Stream multicast, say to 3 wireless clients at that rate and you start to bump into 802.11g's real world limitations (~20Mbps). In the near future, devices that stream HD Quality video will require even higher bandwidth.
...that folks at home use wireless just for internet surfing and downloading. However there are other sources of content beside the web which require higher bandwidth. For example, you can have a couple of Slingboxes or Snappy HAVA's that could wirelessly stream video from your cable boxes, dvds, etc., PVRs, on you LAN to any PCs anywhere on your LAN (and even broadcast it over the internet). I actually had to upgrade my 802.11b to g because I ran into bandwidth limitations.
No Vista/Duke Nuke Forever comments?
Come on people. It's saturday.
In Soviet Russia, standards delay YOU.
Oh wait. Dammit.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A paranoid theory may be that WiMAX forums wants to kill .11n in order to gain market share. ...
We all know WiMAX 50km range was a hoax, all they want is market share and stopping really promissing alternatives
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I work tech support for an academic institution that will remain unnamed. A parent called up asking if we had switched to 802.11N yet. I replied that, given its draft status, we had not. He seemed appalled. He demanded to know how we could play fiddle while our network slid into antiquity. His child had to have the best and us be damned if if didn't exist in a functional form.
These companies will continue to manufacture specialty equipment based on draft N specifications for business use-- and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem lies with the Joe-sixpack consumers who don't recognize the technology's proper application.
Wireless is not part of the backbone, it is a last mile solution for clients. Waiting to get the final version correct is the right choice considering the possible problems that could arise from a bad implemenation.
Benjamin Arai http://www.benjaminarai.com
where 1 or maybe 2 users are utilizing an AP, seldom simultaneously.
In a corporate environment, where many active users may be on an AP, more bandwidth is can be very useful, and "n" is, well, almost twice as good as what's available.
Remember, wireless is a shared medium, like old Ethernet hubs, and that won't change within the current RF bandwidth limitations. Moving from a wired, switched 100 mbps connection to shared 54 mbps (802.11a or g) is almost always a very significant step down in speed in an enterprise network.
802.11n will help, but organizations thinking of going all wireless for user access (and there are a few) are foolish if they have any mission critical applications which depend upon bandwith or speed.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Isn't this similar to the "push" for 802.11b to come out, where eventually it just had to be rushed out because people kepy complaining. And then we found out that WEP was broken. And that 11Mb/s is just a theoretical value and most people can't get close to it. And that dropouts did happen. Sure, I'd love to have 802.11n in my house. But I'd rather wait a couple of years, and get a fully ratified and functional standard, that is reliable and secure and offers what it promises, rather than getting a forced-out-the-door-early standard now which ends up getting fixes and patches for a few years more. And to be honest, who "needs" 802.11n? I've heard comments about people having file servers on wireless, but then they lack bandwidth. Duh. If you have a server, or are planning one, use gigabit ethernet, or at least 100mbit. It's not like you pick your server up and walk around with it. Wireless was meant to give you mobility, so that you can move your laptop/tablet/PDA around, and not be constrained by wires. I doubt it was designed to allow people to place servers willy-nilly, and then be too lazy to run cat 5e/6 cable to it.
I live in an area that's very congested with WiFi. I see anywhere betweeen 5 and 10 different networks. After using 3 routers which provided very choppy, intermittent access, I purchased Pre-N router (MiMO compatible) and things work great. What good is my cable connection if I can't use it on my machines. -Q
I went to the local computer Superstore the other day to look at N routers. Of the four available, 3 complied with N draft one. Is it likely that by the time N comes out there will be enough N draft 1 systems out there that hardware companies may feel compelled to make their systems backward compatible to it?
Also, if not what are the chances that a given "Nd1" router could be upgraded to the standard with just a firmware change?
Do you have a recording of this call? Can you post it? I need a good laugh!
Did you consider telling him that with the 802.11o standard just around the corner that it might be premature to jump into 'n' too quickly?
Did you ask how somebody as stupid as he was managed to have enough money to send his child to your school -- or operate a telephone and call you in the first place?
Just the random thoughts that came to mind reading your unfortunately accurate these days post.
Btw, was his kid about to arrive with an 802.11n ready notebook computer to hook into your network with? Given what I've seen in the stores of pre-standard 'n', I'd love to see the cute not-so-little antenna on that notebook.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm sure a big reason for this is that the latest 11n draft routers and cards perform horribly. Worse than 11g in most (though not all) cases. I'm not sure exactly what happened going from pre-draft, where 11n performed very well, to draft. Perhaps this is part of the rumored fix to keep 11n from stomping all over any 11g/11b equipment in the area.
I'd only bother with the 11n equipment at this point if your 11b/g environment is hugely saturated. And you might want to try switching channels first - most people don't seem to realize that 11 is usually open, and as long as everyone is at or below 6 as per default there should be no interference.