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Fast Wi-Fi's Slow Road To Standardization
CWmike contributes this excerpt from Computerworld: "For a technology that's all about being fast, 802.11n Wi-Fi sure took its sweet time to become a standard, writes Steven J. Vaughan Nichols. In fact, until September 2009, it wasn't, officially, even a standard. But that didn't stop vendors from implementing it for several years beforehand, causing confusion and upset when networking gear that used draft standards from different suppliers wouldn't always work at the fastest possible speed when connected. It wasn't supposed to be that way. But, for years, the Wi-Fi hardware big dogs fought over the 802.11n protocol like it was a chew toy. The result: it took five drama-packed years for the standard to come to fruition. The delay was never over the technology. In fact, the technical tricks that give 802.11n its steady connection speeds of 100Mbps to 140Mbps have been well-known for years."
Betamax vs. VHS, HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, now Wi-Fi draft N versus finalized standard draft N.
Open standards are a good thing. They avoid these kinds of problems. They promote interoperability. They also force vendors to compete on the merits of their implementations of those standards instead of competing on the basis of who is better at customer lock-in. It also lessens but does not remove the competition of who is the best at marketing.
If you care about assigning blame, it lies squarely on the people who purchased draft-N hardware. Whether they realized it or not, they were using their wallets to vote for this behavior. Those purchasing decisions reward this kind of behavior and make it profitable. Give companies the choice of agreeing on a standard or making no sales and they will agree on a standard every time.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I love this line; "The result: it took five drama-packed years for the standard to come to fruition"
Yep, this has definitely kept me on the edge of my seat waaayyyy more than watching Lost or Heroes.
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Between crap home routers and microwaves knocking out my signal I'm just sticking to good ole fashioned cables. Wifi has been nothing but a headache in the years I've used it. Give me a good ethernet cable anyday.
BG is good enough, tied to residential/office network, and hard to notice the benefit of N.
Do you do much copying of files at all? We can see a huge difference on our network (have had n since the first 11n Airport Extreme), with speeds 3-5 times faster than G in the same environment. For us, 11n actually made wireless an acceptable alternative.
The Mothership
I have this magic technology called wired networking. Even the copper stuff goes all the way up to 10Gb.
Wireless is 99% of the time more a pain than it is worth.
Maybe the problem is lack of demand, how many people need the speed, for that matter how many people need the speed of 802.11G. These days everything seems to be about streaming media, at home people stream media off the internet, or for the more geeky stream it off a media server. So do they really need a wireless connection that is 50 times faster than a typical home broadband connection, particularly when these N routers are over twice the price of their G counterparts.
Ike
The same thing happened with 802.11g. I remember going through four 802.11g PCI cards before finding one that could communicate with my 802.11g router at a distance of more than three feet. I was not aware that the devices were pre-draft (they didn't state "pre-draft" on the packaging like they do now), so I did not realize that was causing my problem. Eventually the standard was ratified, and if my memory is correct, the manufacturers released firmware updates so that the devices complied with the ratified standard. I doubt that this practice will go away since the manufacturers want to release bleeding-edge technology to stay ahead of the competition, but at least their packaging now states "pre-draft" so that cautious consumers will know to avoid it.
Basically any 802.11n system is going to be shit with legacy devices nearby. I believe this was one of the final barriers to standardization between Draft-N and final.
So to get decent performance you MUST be in the 5 GHz range. However, there are almost no 5 GHz 802.11n routers out there with external antennas! (Curse Linksys for their move to "saucer" form factors across their entire 802.11 product line... 100% driven by form and aesthetics/marketing, not technical function.) End result is that in most situations, a G router with an external antenna (especially an upgraded one) will blow nearly any of the 11n devices on the market out there.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I also have a girlfriend who bitches when I place wires all round the house. Doesn't stop me doing it though.
an Australian government
and one from the US Constitution: ... Try again, Congress.
Does this not point out a flaw in your logic?
He's obviously suggesting that U.S. Congress failed because it didn't order an invasion of Australia to promote the progress of science.
My sig will be released in 2015 third quarter. Rating pending.
Despite the moniker of "open standard" every vendor who contributes to these standards and who has "voting" authority on them have to maintain their business interests. 802.11n was held up more for business reasons, members are competitors remember, where some didn't have product available. They obviously want to make sure that their engineering and pre-manufacturing ramp ups are in line before the standard is released. Like 802.11n, this didn't stop many vendors from releasing "pre standard" products as soon as the RF standards were put into place. In reality it then becomes a firmware or driver issue to become compliant once the status is released.
If the standards boards were truly "open" then they'd get the standards drafted, agreed to and voted on in short order. The reality is that they need the industry experts and those experts also have to maintain their company's interests. It won't change, just learn to live with it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
One of the tricks is low density parity check codes (LDPCC) which are the best currently known error correcting codes. They're decoded with a wonderfully elegant decoding algorithm which is embarresingly parallel so it works very well in hardware.
In fact, you can pretty much implement the belief network in hardware directly.
The codes are also used in 10G Ethernet, too.
Funny thing is that they date from the 60's, but were impractical because of the amount of computation required to decode them. The decoding algorithm was then rediscovered for inference on Bayes nets.
If you lick this sort of thing, it is worth reading Mackay's book on inference which is free online. I have no affiliation to Mackay, btw.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I completely agree with the parent. Wireless is often more trouble than it's worth. It's great for casual internet access on laptops, but it's really unreliable for HD video streaming, system backups, or large file transfers. If you live in a single-family home, you probably don't have many interference issues to deal with, but in a multi-unit apartment building, there is often significant interference on the 2.4 Ghz spectrum not merely from other Wireless routers but from phones, microwaves, baby monitors and other devices. The end result is often dropouts, unreliable connectivity, and slow speeds.
Wired Ethernet is a reliable and mature technology that pretty much always works. While the vast majority of wireless routers are crap, it's quite easy to purchase a quality Gigabit Switch, and pretty much any wireless router will provide stable wired connections. People seem to ignore the fact that wireless only provides shared speeds while wired ethernet provides dedicated bidirectional bandwidth per port. In addition, the stated maximums for wired ethernet provide a sense of real world speeds while wireless does not.
For example, 802.11g provides real-world speeds of 20-25 Mbit/sec - not the 54 Mbit theoretical speed pasted on the box. 802.11n is advertised as 300 Mbit/sec but generally provides 100-130 Mbit/sec at best. However, these speeds can only be obtained with a line-of-sight connection at a short distance - a distance so short that you could easily connect over wired ethernet and obtain 10x the speed! At 100-BaseTX I am able to obtain 90 Mbit/sec after network (94 Mbit/sec with Jumbo frames). With Jumbo Frames Gigabit can achieve 950 Mbit/sec or higher speeds.
So, 802.11n in a best-case scenario (little interference, 10 ft from the AP) provides speeds only slightly in excess of 100-BaseTX, a standard formed 14 years ago (1995)! If you actually connect from any significant distance, 100-BaseTX will provide better speeds. In addition, you get dedicated upstream and downstream per-port bandwdith on 100-BaseTX.
Gigabit switches with Jumbo frame support can now be had for less than $30 - and in some cases $20. Nearly all laptops and desktops now come with Gigabit NICs and support Jumbo frames. Modern dual and quad-core CPUs can easily take the overhead of transferring at gigabit speeds with or without jumbo frames. Furthermore, modern OS's are more efficient at high-speed network transfers.
Yet, I see 802.11n routers advertised for streaming HD video, system backups, and large file transfers. Would you really want to backup 100 GB over 802.11n? Sounds like fun watching your entire network come to a crawl for 3 hours. Gigabit ethernet over Cat 5e/6 is generally limited only by your hard drive setup, and can be used for all the aforementioned tasks without any impact on network performance.
The following is my recent experience with wireless networking:
I use a WRT54GL with the Tomato (Linux) firmware. This provides a rock-solid solution, yet I was getting dropouts on wireless at my current apartment. I know it's not the router as it worked fine in my cinderblock college dorm, and I have another WRT54GL running Tomato at my home in NJ - which usually is up for months at a time - until a power outage.
At my latest apartment, I was getting constant dropouts on wireless. I ran a second AP to get a stronger connection. The connection was indeed stronger but I still got intermingle dropouts. I tried changing the wireless channel, antenna placement etc. but nothing worked. Finally, I just said fuck it, bought a 100' Cat 5e cable for $8 and ran it directly from the ADSL router to the router in my room. No dropouts since then - and I get more consistent and faster speeds.
I purchased an 8 port Gigabit switch with Jumbo Frames for my internal network and now my network speeds are limited only by my hard drives. Transferring between a 1 TB eSATA and 1 TB SATA drive, I was able to transfer a 12 GB file in 2:15 at an average speed of 95 MB/sec - around 800 Mbit/sec. With
Learn how to dress up the wiring nicely. It's a useful skill to have, and females appreciate quality nest-building in a mate.