Slashdot Mirror
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."
Some internet lines are already faster than the effective 5mbps of 802.11b and watching HD over 5mbps is impossible.
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).
The same reason people use Gigabit Ethernet. The point n is not for extra-network protocols, but inter-network ones (For example: VNC)
Not all wireless apps are for use in the mobile market. The intended final incarnation of my media server will see remote wireless nano-PCs attached to tvs all around the house, to access all content through the server. When 2 or more devices are running concurrently, 22 Mbps gets saturated and you get the *buffering* that we all hate.
Roll on 1 Gbps wireless !
I'm posting this comment on my desktop via VNC from my laptop. Raw-encoded VNC over SSH with compression gets me anywhere from 3mbit/s to 20mbit/s. That's on "54" mbit/s wi-fi, and I'm two floors from the router (but the maximum I've ever achieved, even with the laptop right next to the router, is around 25mbit/s).
Stop assuming that wireless is only ever used for accessing the internet. I'd love to be able to get a solid 20MB/s (note: megabyte, not megabit) sustained transfer rate over wireless. 11n has the potential to deliver that, so I'm all for it.
Goten Xiao
It's a lot easier to understand your post if you don't get MB and Mb confused. My current Internet connection is 4Mb/s, and I can saturate that (500KB/s) for extended periods. An 802.11b connection is a theoretical 11Mb/s, but in practice can be a lot lower. Also consider than any wireless connection is shared, and multiple people accessing it at once can dramatically reduce the bandwidth available.
My home network uses 802.11g, and I can generally get a sustained transfer rate of about 2-3MB/s for local traffic. The speed of my Internet connection has doubled every 12-18 months in the last 4 years, and I have no reason to suspect this will slow down any time soon. It only needs to double two more times before I start saturating an 802.11g network, and that's assuming that no one else is using it for local transfers. In three-four years, 802.11g will not be fast enough.
If you 'work for a wireless company,' you should also be aware that 802.11n is not a replacement for 802.11g; it is a WMAN solution, not a WLAN solution; more of a competitor to 4G mobile telephone connections than it is to WiFi.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
See, we all know it's useful for us. But we slashdotters are too savvy to think about our own needs and preferences, so instead we discuss everything in terms of some mythical "average joe" or "joe sixpack." Joe's life consists solely of beer and football, so almost evey new technology is worthless to him. But suffering others' foolishness is the burden of our genius, so we defer all our opinions to Joe.