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The Future of 802.11ac
CowboyRobot writes "The 802.11ac standard is expected to be ratified in 2013 and NetworkComputing has an interview with representatives of Cisco Systems and Aerohive Networks about what that will mean for everyone else. 'Out of the gate, the increases in performance over 11n will not be tremendously impressive. The second wave--which will require a hardware refresh--gets far more interesting... First-generation 802.11ac products will achieve up to 1.3 Gbps through the use of three spatial streams, 80-MHz-wide channels (double the largest 40 MHz channel width with 802.11n), and use of better hardware components that allow higher levels of modulation and encoding (up to 256-QAM). Whether we will actually see 802.11ac products capable of 6.9 Gbps is dependent on hardware enhancements on both the access point and client that are not certain.'"
"I haven't seen more than low single digit MB/s over wireless LAN, even under line of sight conditions with hardly any interference."
You must be using shitty hardware. We're using ubiquiti hardware at my office and getting the expected speeds.
damned ISP's choke the shit out of our connections so what is the purpose for exactly... killer LAN parties?!?
Am I missing something here? Using math "up to 1.3 Gbps" is more than 4x N's "up to 300Mbps" which was a huge jump over G's "up to 54Mbps" so, apparently you need to be 5.5x or faster to be classified a huge jump for cisco people, a measly 4.3x doesn't do it.
802.11ac isn't out yet but I have little hope of it really helping. I live in an apartment building I can already see 50+ routers on 2.4 & 10+ ON 5GH.
I just don't see that much of a benefit unless the congestion avoidance is really better than 102.11n.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I've had just over 200 Mbit/s with 5 GHz 802.11n, sitting in the next room from the AP, with a wall between us.
And probably noone else using the 5 GHz band in your area - am I right? Because as soon as the signal / noise ratio decreases the high efficiency modulations stop working and you must live with much lower spectral effifciency - that is' much lower usable bandwidth for the same slice of the spectrum.
Unfortunately increasing the transmission power doesn't help a lot - after all, the neighbour wants high bandwidth as well leading to an arms race.
for 802.11y hardware
The real speed will arrive with 802.11xxx - specially designed for broadcasting 3D porn ;-)
Remember that 5Ghz has a much shorter range than 2.4Ghz so the problems with traffic congestion won't be as bad. If all of your neighbours switched to 5Ghz, you'd still see a noticeable real-world improvement over 2.4Ghz.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Hah, that's nothing. 802.11ac was developed by those trolls who keep posting stuff with my slashdot account!
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A. C.
I've got a cheapass n router and I get 11 MB/s, which is pretty decent considering it's only got 100 Mb/s into it.
256-QAM modulation for wireless data transfer, sure...
What's the intended range in realistic situations, 5cm?
I usually get 3-4 MB/s, have had more than a few peaks of 5 MB/s. Which isn't all that weird considering 54 Mbps. And that's through laminate, not exactly the best material for WiFi. Important side note is that I live in the middle of nowhere and the 2.4 GHz band is almost empty except for my neighbours routers which aren't too close either. If you're in an environment with a lot of noise like an apartment building it's worth the additional expense to get the 5GHz equipment.
With all the recent Wi-Fi developments, why isn't encryption now standard? I should be able to setup an *open* access point with encryption these days so my users don't get their email passwords jacked. There is absolutely NO technical reason why this cannot be part of any modern specification. I will never ever use an open access point for this very reason...
Is it possible to simply deploy more APs?
None. Most of them are about reducing congestion problems, typically through reducing range (like 2.4GHz to 5GHz shift) or various antennae and beamforming solutions.
Your problem is the exact opposite, and typically handled by installing additional WiFi routers or amplifiers. Your problem has been long solved, but it would appear that your motel is simply not interested in investing in solutions.
Get some extra wlan routers, put them at intermediate points and bridge to different channels to extend the range (repeaters make inefficient use of channel bandwidth). Not entirely trivial to setup but perfectly doable even with cheap routers.
Always obsessed with speed. Year after year all most of us want is better range and less interference, not more speed. More channels and frequencies are needed. Do that and it might have a chance at being interesting.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, it all comes down to the neighbors. in areas where nobody else is running .N hardware? I've been able to get speeds for my customers on their wireless networks that were as fast as the cable could go, whereas in places where multiple people are using? They are lucky to get 200k in some places.
The problem is just too damned many people are jumping on the wireless bandwagon and even the ISPs have started handing out wireless routers (at least in my area) so the whole thing is just too crowded. I would say we need another channel but considering how much wireless spectrum goes for good luck with that, I'm shocked some company hasn't bought from the government one of the channels we already have.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is kind of like asking, "What is the point of having 100 megabit ethernet when hardly any ISPs have 100 megabit service?"
Palm trees and 8
Here's the problem: the law only allows relatively narrow bands for unlicensed use (courtesy of the ITU), and so getting "more channels" is not easy to do. You could mandate that the standard operate on more bands -- 900MHz, 24GHz, 60GHz, etc. -- but that will drive up the cost of the equipment.
Palm trees and 8
802.11ac will be a relative failure for the consumer market. While it will provide great speed benefits for very short ranges, the penetration og 5GHz through walls etc. will require lots of APs and won't be widely adopted.
However...
802.11ac for open space, line of sight, long range backhaul links sounds pretty promising.
It's got more application in a server room than it does in the home. Range will be no better (and probably worse) than 5Ghz on your 802.11n routers and the amount of 5Ghz frequency it requires is simply put: ALL OF IT. So you won't be able to place multiple routers in an area, because they'll stomp on each other either at the AP or the endpoints.
This is a standard for (at best) a home audio/video system where all the components are nearby and for a server rack where you use wireless as a second network to communicate between servers. For home device use, most of us will be better off with 802.11n
And BTW, 802.11n is *still* not being fully utilized. You can get 600Mbps (air speed) per frequency out of a single 802.11n router if you take full advantage of its spatial abilities. The best I know of is 450Mbps per frequency. Ruckus probably makes the best APs out there right now.
...Steve
All my WiFi gear still uses the 802.11b range as I get better speeds from it then the .11g mode and don't even try N mode as I don't have any adapters that offer/use it. Simply aint worth the money due to to many routers on the same damn frequency. Hell I'm even looking to switch back to the old 900Mhz band for cordless phones due to everyone having moved to the 5Ghz models. Better range and no interference from others. All of this crap in the same band simply chokes 802.11n speeds to less then what I see on the 11b settings, which pushes damn close to the full 10M advertised wired speed for 10M ethernet. Not bad and for the house, it's good enough for all of us to use at the same time.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I have to ask: Is anyone getting even close to these advertised transfer rates in real world scenarios? I haven't seen more than low single digit MB/s over wireless LAN, even under line of sight conditions with hardly any interference.
Same problem here. At 25 feet, 100mbit wired trumps 802.11n significantly for streaming video. It's good for cellphones, laptops, and other toys but for moving anything other than tiny amounts of data it's insufficient for me. Of course, I've got everything running gigabit wired now, so this really won't even be slightly interesting to me until the "second wave". By that time 10GB wired or better will probably be running through my attic... so we'll see.
Omnidirectional, not really. Directional? Hell yeah, I have Ubiquiti Powerbridges deployed and I'm pushing ~297 Mbps.
That's what the AP's dashboard reports. And tyhe manufacturer and its Apple-esque acolytes will argue that that's "radio" speed. But, run iperf , or some internet bandwidth tester and get back to us.
Actual TCP/IP bandwidth on your ~297 Mbps link is less than 100Mbps. Hell the PowerBridge only has a 10/100 Base-TX ethernet interface! How do you suppose they squeeze 297Mbps over 100Mbps? Yea. Horse hockey!
The real speed will arrive with 802.11xxx - specially designed for broadcasting 3D porn ;-)
Are you implying there are network protocols designed for other uses primarily?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I already use a WRT that has the same SID/password as the 11N AP to cover some parts of my apartment. That doesn't change the high noise floor/interference from all the neighbouring APs.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Already doing that. My Freebox in in one corner of the apartment & I have an old WRT with the same SID/password in the opposite corner where multiple walls & neighboring wifi APs render the freebox wifi unusable. I can thus pass off from the freebox & the WRT transparently but that doesn't change the high noise floor & interference from all the other nets.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Who cares about speed. 802.11ac will give you better range. 4x4 will give you better range because of beamforming.
Yes, something is definitely wrong there. Even in our most crowded areas on campus our clients manage more than that on raw tx/rx rates -- of course, having that raw "wirespeed" doesn't mean you get that amount of data throughput when tens of other clients are also using the "wire".
Someone had to do it.
...happened to the rest of the alphabet sequence? No M?
The problem is just too damned many people are jumping on the wireless bandwagon and even the ISPs have started handing out wireless routers
I remember my first experiences with wifi back in 2006. I recall that the DSL ISP started making it an option back then. G was seldom seen, and everyone was on 2.4ghz, except for the Wireless A guys ( the routers used to tout ABG big time, though WEP was still king and XP didn't quite support WPA out of the box).
A year later I started getting other people set up, buying a few routers and handing my older ones down as gifts. I eventually settled on a dual band one in 2009 and have been pretty satisfied. However, my ISP and most others are lagging behind on real IPv6 support, so DHCP6 goes unused for now. Sadly, I have seen prices drop, yes, but protocols A and B have also disappeared quietly from support lists. The good part is that for about half the price, I can get dual-band now. That took long!
Somewhat off-topic rant: The problem now is that my recent $800 laptop doesn't do 5Ghz, which surprised me considering $70 routers do, and $40 routers support "300N" this year^W^W as of 2012. Neither does my year-old android phone, nor most devices I hook up from work, family or friends. My 2007 laptop had no problem doing so, but it cost the full $1000 and didn't have appealing features with the current year's lineup.
My $500 PC from last year was a satisfying upgrade to the older system I had for years. It surprised by failing to support Gigabit when I finally went and bought the Cat 6 cable. The old $20 NIC I saved up for it is not PCI-E, but had latent support for 1000BaseT, I think. Sad. Today's fragmented networking involves more research than even slashdotters like me care to do, and still moves at a glaciar pace. We ARE being dominated by money-saving choices and ISPs that no longer offer old, non-wifi routers, though most people end up losing...
I have worked a couple jobs where VPNs and/or bandwidth-heavy applications such as stock tickers were the cause of the issue, but the [local or business client] users cleverly hide the fact that they don't know what they're doing when the insist on Wifi just because they got a laptop from their office for work.
I have to ask: Is anyone getting even close to these advertised transfer rates in real world scenarios? I haven't seen more than low single digit MB/s over wireless LAN, even under line of sight conditions with hardly any interference.
In 2010 or so I was sadly surprised that my backups (PC Hard drive - > wifi laptop ) hit some invisible barrier of around 1.5 to 2 MByte/s from Windows host to laptop (Ubuntu or Windows). That was despite connections being between 11 and 54Mbit (yeah, the speed negotiated was pretty unstable for some reason, AND overhead plus bit to byte conversions kills about 90% of the fat number we see on the box). PS: Two different rooms, with a drywall separating both machines. The total separation was less than 10 feet given the small size of these apartments. I think I hit a peak of 3M to 4MByte/s, for like one minute out of 30 or so.
I declined to run another home test this year when buying a replacement for my old dead laptop and just opted for a USB adapter for transfer on the main PC. I should have tested, given that I've since plopped DDWRT on the same router, the new laptop's connection is stable in connection speeds and I always do CUT-PASTE rather than COPY-paste to never miss my place for inevitable CRC, Wired SMB errors and Wifi disconnects. Despite my layers of protection, I chalk it up to having lost confidence in Wifi in general. See my other comment for other setbacks.
Personally I wouldn't use the one built into a laptop, they ALL suck ass when it comes to bandwidth. I use a little USB dual antenna unit for my customers, works great on desktops and laptops and gets better throughput than the frankly weak units they build into laptops. You have to remember laptops are all about cutting costs and one easy way to cut costs is to have weaker antennas and Wifi chips. Here is the unit I use and sell and I can tell you that unless an area is heavily congested i can usually get pretty close to the max their Internet can handle through one of these, and its small enough you can just slap it in a bookbag no problem.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.