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802.11n Draft 2.0 Approved by Working Group
[Geeks Are Sexy] writes "Yes folks, the 802.11 Working Group has finally approved Draft 2.0 of the 802.11n spec, bringing us a step closer to its final form. 'With the positive vote from the 802.11n Working Group, the Wi-Fi Alliance will now begin officially certifying equipment as being compliant with Draft 2.0. That's an important step, as official Draft 2.0-compliant gear is guaranteed to be fully compatible with the final 802.11n standard.'"
is 802.11_ updated faster than it can be deployed? I'm still on "b" ... am I a loser?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
use wires.
If you don't want to use wireless then don't
Personally I like the fact I don't have to rip out my house to lay cat5, or have it streaming across floors so my brother in his room can access the internet and my xbox in the living room can get net access too.
Just curious, if certified Draft 2.0 devices are guaranteed compliant with the final standard, how is Draft 2.0 not final?
ISO seems to be more efficient at ramrodding through standards we don't want (OOXML) rather than getting out the ones we are desperately waiting for. :p
It will take a couple of months at least for certified equipment to appear. Having participated in a couple of the working group meetings, I can say that (unfortunately) one of the unsaid goals for any of the participating companies was to make sure that none of their competitor's proposals go through as is. The rationale being that the competitor would have a chip design almost ready to go with that technique and will be faster to hit the market and grab market share...
http://www.jcshome.net/gallery/Pooh-in-trouble.jpg
Kitty would agree with you. Wires are delicious.
With this speed increase, we will see even MORE packets per second on these networks, which only makes cracking of WEP, WPA, and LEAP that much faster now that the cryptographic sample set increases.
for sale
I'm a self-modifying sig virus
No, draft means final. Where were you when web 2.0 was launched?
Doesn't belkin have some 802.11 pre-N devices out there? Are owners of those devices doomed to a life of security via obscurity?
Although i think that making wireless g implicitly (or giving the appearance of this) compatible with b was one of the greatest moves to allow for adoption of new tech. I know that the b/g compatibility is probably nearing speed and range limits (or ran right into them), but i'm also disappointed that you'll have to get combo compatibility with combo cards.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
You're thinking mostly home. Think full-scale enterprise, like I have to. It takes very little to saturate the links, especially when you factor in how much of the operations are now handled over the network. It's not just a few e-mails; Outlook can consume significant bandwidth (as can any client that keeps at least a copy client-side), and many companies require all data to be kept on network shares. Throw in roaming profiles and group policy-based software installations (even using BITS), and you can eat up wireless bandwidth very quickly.
The ability to match wire speeds for numerous users is going to be a huge benefit to companies that want to deploy wireless for something other than convenience in the conference rooms. Even when using a proper channel layout, even using 802.11a, you still have bandwidth contention within a channel on a single AP, and it mars the experience for the general user. Splitting higher bandwidth will assist in alleviating these issues.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
What if you want to stream HD video from your computer to a wireless set top box (like a next gen AppleTV)?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
not to rain on your case but there is more then just internet traffic on my home network. I stream content and move files around to where I need them.
Smile It hurts!
So which CAT-n cable company do you hold stock in? Or are you just hedging Copper Futures?
(teasing)
*woosh*
Another sarcasm bullet narrowly misses a modder's noggin, and a post that made me laugh out loud gets modded Troll.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
We're more than halfway through the alphabet already. How long until we run out of letters, and have to designate our wireless standards by shapes, colors, or other designations?
p apery-texture!"
"Guess what! My network is now running exclusively on 802.11blue-dodecahedron-with-lemon-scent-and-sand
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It doesn't even have to be HD, it takes quite some time to transfer content from my Tivo to my computer.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Once official N gear starts hitting store shelves in full force, the G stuff is going to go "free after rebate" to clear the shelves.
Then we will see people buying trunk-fulls of G access points, and distributing grids of the free access points all over their property, providing greater coverage and more (net) bandwidth for the cost of $0 + time.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Silly question: Did your connection slow because of other traffic on the AP, or was your bit error rate becoming too excessive?
Range is the key for me. Isn't it supposed to double or treble the distance it will work over, versus b/g?
more important than increased speed is the touted additional distance....
Those few extra milliseconds can and often do mean the difference between life and death.
Perhaps you would be happier with hobby a little less lethal?
If those are my only two options, it was likely bit error rate. I was not on the edge, but I was not close either. Plus, there was a decent amount of interference. All this could have been avoided with n.
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
200 Mbps is already obsolete. 54 Mbps was reasonable when standard new installation wire networks were 100 Mbps. But now it is 1000 Mbps or more. 802.11n is less than 20% bandwidth of a new wired installation. What a worthless spec.
I agree. 640kb^H^H^H^H^H 54mbps ought to be enough for anyone.
But, people don't only use their networks for web traffic.
I know quite a few people who have wireless media players integrated into their stereos. If you're streaming your A/V stuff over your network, or copying files about between your computers, bandwidth is *good*.
I know when I'm backing up data from my work laptop to my FreeBSD file server over wireless, I sometimes wish it was faster.
Once your wireless runs most of your lan, there are lots of reasons why more local bandwidth is a thing you may want. Some people might have more local traffic that internet traffic.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ping is almost entirely affected by the path your signal takes, not the throughput of the connection. If your ping goes through lots of routers, or otherwise takes the long way to get to its destination, you'll have long ping times, regardless of how fast your connection to those servers is. So, 802.11n is going to result in very little, if any, improvement to your ping times. By analogy, your voice travels the speed of sound, no matter how quickly you talk.
Try this: ping one of your game servers with your access point in 802.11g mode, then reconfigure it to 802.11b mode and ping the same server. There should be no significant difference.
The only sure way to reduce ping times is to find a shorter path to your servers. That probably means switching ISPs. For example, we had much faster ping times with our DSL provider than our cable provider. YMMV.
I have music, video, recorded TV programs, pictures, document, etc. that eat up a couple of terrabytes of data. Having them spread among 4 or 5 PC's and Laptop is not practical. I have a dedicated home file server with replication among several PC's for vital docs and pictures.
Trying to get all of that to work with reasonable speed with 54Mbs pipe is not realistic. And I don't want to tear up all the drywall to retro fit the house with wirings.
The 802.11 N is really going to make it easier to manage all the content in my house.
Wireless gaming is quite the little nightmare isnt it?
Here are some things you can do. The goal is getting the ping to the wireless router to be 1ms (or less) consistantly. 2-4ms consistantly is okay but past that lots of problems creep in.
1. Some wireless managers do something stupid every 30 or 60 seconds that causes lost packets and delays. The MS XP SP2 manager is one of these. I use the linksys manager that came with my card now.
2. Find a free channel in you area. Or the one with the least amount of interference on one of the three non overlapping channels.
3. Set your router to be either G or B only (pick one). Doing both adds some time slicing silliness that hurts latency. You might want to try both and see which one works out best for you.
4. Get as close as possible to the router.
5. Get a better antenna/chipset. You need a stellar connection with no interference.
I finally got my desktop to ping the router at 1ms consistantly with no lost packets. Well, once in a great while. Its so much more effort than running an unslightly wire and the wireless still 'feels' slow on BF2. Other games that arent as network demanding may fare better. Now I just run a wire when I want to play just to be extra safe and leave wireless for when im not gaming.
Lastly, an n-connection may not be at all faster in terms of latency. You may still have time slicing problems, weird interference issues, extra CPU usage, etc. Its not really like ethernet at all. Depending on the manufacturer and what the air interface is like near you it could be worse (latency wise) than running an old B router with a decent antenna.
Actually, I tend to agree. I can't imagine ever using wireless for anything more important than say, reading Slashdot or Perez Hilton. Slow, insecure by definition, and inconsistent. I'll take wires over wireless any day.
I don't respond to AC's.
It would be nice if the shift to 802.11n meant that we saw more built-in support for the 5 GHz band. 802.11a seems to have mostly died in the consumer market, while the 2.4 GHz band with its overlapping channels gets more and more congested with b/g devices. Unless you live in low density housing, you aren't going to get anywhere near 54 Mbps to your router, even if you wanted to.
Unfortunately, since 802.11n allows for 2.4 GHz and/or 5 GHz operation, there are some people who are pessimistic that we'll see many consumer grade devices that are dual band. (A quick check revealed that the Airport Extreme base station does both 2.4 and 5 GHz, which is nice, but I can't tell if the Macbooks with draft-n cards do both bands as well.)
ISO seems to be more efficient at ramrodding through standards we don't want (OOXML) rather than getting out the ones we are desperately waiting for. :p
I think their speed is clearly proportional to the amount of grease that's applied to the inner workings of the system....
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Damn straight! No one has any business buying or selling wireless equipment until it is the same speed as a wired network. Otherwise, a 100 ft ethernet cable would do you just fine.
The Universal Character Set has, as of Unicode 5.0, some 98,000+ graphemes, so I think we'll be good for a little while.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
this is still draft 2.0
sure, its not too far from final...but its still not FINAL. thus there can be no guarantee
that kit would be 100% compatible.
which was an attempt to force us to not be able to get "free" wireless, I'm all in favor of 200 GB/s.
But, an important question, will this interfere with my ability to listen to CIA broadcasts on my fillings?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I just want to jump in here and say that running a wire is much, much easier than most people think it is. The only time it can really be a pain is when you live in an apartment... in which case you are likely to have neighbors polluting the region of the radio spectrum near 2.4GHz.
In fact, you don't even need to know anything about wiring to install a network cable. All you need to know is how you're going to run the cable. The connectors have color codes on them (if you buy anything but the very cheapest) and you can just press the wires into the proper areas, matching their color codes, and snap the little crimp connectors on.
Wireless is indeed the answer in some situations - those situations are all ones in which you're moving around, or a remote site to which you cannot run a wire. For everything else, you owe it to yourself to run a wire. You can run 100Mbps for hundreds of meters...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
(A quick check revealed that the Airport Extreme base station does both 2.4 and 5 GHz, which is nice, but I can't tell if the Macbooks with draft-n cards do both bands as well.)
The macbooks and macbooks pros can do 802.11 a/b/g/pre-n (pre-n with the enabler patch)
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I have a Macbook Core 2 Duo with the 802.11N enabler and an Airport Extreme using the 5 GHz band. It works beautifully. Though now I'm curious if the Extreme will be final spec compliant...
As someone who switched from Wireless to Gigabit, Yeah both do have their purposes.
We still have wireless for PDAs and other equipment which moves.
The house is wired up for gigabit network though for all the computers.
Having 0.09ms ping is certainly nice.
...will it include priority packet support for Duke Nukem Forever?
2. Find a free channel in you area
just bite the bullet and buy 802.11a equipment, nobody uses that frequency so much less interference!
When I can upgrade my old Dell D600 that still has a MiniPCI card (not PCIe) to 801.11n I will be happy. I'm not about to stick a PCMCIA card in this thing.
I'm just trying to mentally picture LAX or ORD with several thousand people each hooked up via a 100ft ethernet cable...
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
You can run 100Mbps for hundreds of meters...
No sir, you can run 100Mbps for 90 meters,If so, good thinking! I see nothing wrong with making adjustments to someone's router if it's a cheap $10, 108Mbit super-router that occupies 2/3 of the available spectrum and renders the other 1/3 unusable..
Maybe that's just my opinion..
Only the Core 2 Duo Systems have the pre-n cards. The first gen macbook pro's with just Core Duo don't get this unfortunately. Though if you're brave I've read you can upgrade fairly easily.
So for all of those people who have Apple's pre-N implementation, how does this compare/contrast? Is Apple's implementation essentially on target or are we seeing a fork in the road? And once it does get finalized, are Mac users going to be able to use standard access points or only Apple access points that use a cludge for Apple's pre-N implementations? And finally, will this affect the patch that Apple is selling to enable 802.11n on all those Core 2 Duo's out there?
Yes, I know where to get that data.
I believe I have it shoved up my ass, right next to other off-topic shit.
I think for most people using WiFi for Web surfing, G is plenty good enough.
What's that? Not many people are streaming video over g? Really? Oh, right, you can't.
I'm facetiously pointing out that because people aren't doing stuff that's technologically possible doesn't mean that they wouldn't want it if it were possible.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Thank you!
LOL it is quite difficult to find how they do it, I take it you failed.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
No, I haven't messed with their settings ;), although I am not sure if it is morally correct to change their SSID to SECURE_THIS_NETWORK to point out how vulnerable they are.
;)
They may get pissed.
Does draft 2.0 deal with 802.11n trashing any nearby b/g access point traffic? That to me is the biggest hurdle with 802.11n technology.
If my neighbor goes out and buys a new wireless "n" router, my old 802.11b router traffic will go to hell.
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
"1. Some wireless managers do something stupid every 30 or 60 seconds that causes lost packets and delays. The MS XP SP2 manager is one of these. I use the linksys manager that came with my card now."
OMFG please provide more information on this AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
I've had nothing short of nightmares with XP SP2 wireless over the past 2 years, drop outs, random "shit" - it's just been incredibly intermittant and difficult to diagnose (and I've been doing hardware for years)
I did try the Intel and Ralink "proprietry" drivers rather than the native XP control tool for wireless and still I suffer some issues, none the less I'd love to hear more as you clearly know something I don't.
Thanks for the info.
Mod this fellow up!
54mbits be damned! even if you do the "pessimistic" network calculator equation, trying to weigh in overhead (54/10, not 54/10) that's still 5.4mb a second.
Does ANYONE get 5.4mb/sec sustained?
Seriously, I get at best abuot 2.8mbytes a second on a really good day, sitting next to the router and I've tried 3 different models.
That's 28mbits a second (allowing for overhead) or 22.4mbits a second without.
Come the heck on!
It's based on this exact formula and general bullshit from the industry (specifically to wireless) that I figure 802.11n with it's "300mbit" (iirc) speeds that I'll MAYBE get 10mbytes a second (same as 100mb ethernet)
We'll see in the long run, but to summarise, 54mbits is bullshit and sometimes, for those of us with multiple machines - it's nasty.
Has anyone explored/implemented ethernet over powerlines? As far as I can see it has all the security, Netgear are now producing some high speed adaptors, and you're using the existing wiring within the site...
I'd be interested to know if this is a worthy replacement for any wireless network within a home? Especially bearing in mind with the dense population in the UK's cities...
Like this?
I haven't used them for gaming, but for all other purposes, they seem fine...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I just change the SSID to Open.Net ;)
Help make a worldwide grid of open networks
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
did the joke fly over my head ? hard to tell... ;)
leaving no place for overhead, but mentioning it, mixing up bits & bytes in every sentence... nah, this gotta be a good troll
Rich
I made a mistake - I meant to say instead of 54/8 (whoops, not 10!) I generally find that a good average is /10
:(
100mbit ethernet is extremely rarely 12mbit or 11 or 10.5 - it's about 10mbit
10mbit is generally 1mb a second instead of 1.2mbit
You get the idea, anyhow 54mbit as they "claim" you'd figure hell at WORST case 4mbytes a second.
I've never seen anything over 2.8 and that's with about 5 diff wireless cards 6 or 7 AP's I've worked with - it just doesn't do over 2.8mbit.
Talk about bullshit figures
Sorry, I didn't write that initial post too well, much haste.
Agreed, I ran cat5e round our whole house soon after moving in. Best improvement I made. It's not quite as easy as you make out though and if I did it again I'd think more about where I put the cable drops (the patch panel is in the loft). Wireless has also come down in price a lot since I wired up my place so maybe a couple of base stations would be a better solution.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
i'd like to remind that you left out any overhead. depending on protocol, link quality, type of data transferred, it can get pretty high.
i guess with wireless you have to account for somewhat higher latency and fluctuations in both signal strength and quality, so guesstimate the overhead on retransmitting even a bit more.
i haven't tested wireless speed and don't have access to any equipment right now, but it would be interesting to test different adapters, routers, protocols and use cases.
Rich
I think you will find that it goes considerably further than that if you use cat5e or cat6, unless you are using some crap linksys nics etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So now I have to go out and purposefully by devices for my computer that are N-compatible or N-capable but, only if I want them to work properly.
Does anyone see the irony here?
There are only two steps in the gathering of ultimate knowledge. Open your eyes and, RTFM!
I think it rescans the area for networks every 30 or 60 seconds which causes a delay. I also know theres an issue with this and USB wifi adapters. Whatever it does at 30 or 60 seconds really messes up some USB wifi cards. THey usually drop link and then re-attach. It has to be exactly 30 or 60 seconds. If its not, then you have other problems.
my response was to discussion about how to make the most of 802.11b/g
Then I don't understand your point. Because you seemed to be suggesting buying equipment based on its use of a less congested band, when clearly that is not going to be the case in future due to increasing 802.11n adoption.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
it'll take a while for 11n to really take off and cause congestion to 11a users, and by that point 11n will be congested and "useless" too, so you'll have to go for wimax/wibro or even just bite the bullet and put in cat6e cabling!