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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."
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.
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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.
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).
What do you think of gigabit ethernet, then? As with any networking protocl, 802.11x has more uses than merely connecting to the Internet.
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In the netherlands, you can get 22 Mb/s from certain cable internet providers (e.g. multikabel). That's a solid throughput of 2/3 MB/s. And even then you presume that WiFi can only be used for internet. Note that 11n is meant for home/office use. Maybe you could broaden your views a bit?
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.
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That's right. 100base-T and gigabit ethernet are pointless. Why have a LAN that is faster than the internet?
Is there some strange reason that Slashdotters think that the only use for wireless networks is browsing the Internet? None of you have ever used wireless to print, or copy a file off a server, or play a LAN game, or stream video, had more than one wireless device running?
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.
In Soviet Russia, standards delay YOU.
Oh wait. Dammit.
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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.