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What the FCC's Wi-Fi Expansion Means For You

Posted by timothy on from the new-haircuts-all-around dept.

alphadogg writes "Mobile devices like the iPhone 5 are embracing the 5GHz band, and that trend will expand as 802.11ac radios become prevalent even on smartphones starting in 2013. The FCC announced a New Year's Wi-Fi gift during the International CES show earlier this month: a proposal to dramatically expand the unlicensed spectrum in the 5GHz frequency band for use by Wi-Fi devices. The announcement comes as a growing number of vendors are announcing products that will support the "Gigabit Wi-Fi" 802.11ac standard in 2013. To find out the implications of the FCC's plan, Network World talked with Matthew Gast, director of product management for Aerohive Networks (author of "802.11n: A Survival Guide"). Gast blogged enthusiastically after FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the spectrum move, even admitting he had an 'engineer-crush' on the chairman as a result."

4 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. same as before, use Cat5 by alen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    in NYC so many people have wifi that i get better performance with cat5. i got tired of my xbox disconnecting from Live and started using Cat5 instead.

    i have something like 20 hot spots around me. 5GHz will be nice for a few years until everyone gets on it as well.

    1. Re:same as before, use Cat5 by bobbied · · Score: 3, Interesting

      yea, Cause you can get easily grab a fiber xbox adapter. Not.

      Actually you can easily get media converters for about $100 US each and use a short patch cable to wire it directly to your XBox 360 network port...

      If I was you, I'd be more concerned about getting the fiber pulled and terminated. Putting on fiber connections is something that takes a bit of equipment and a bit of skill that can be somewhat costly to obtain. But, remember, I said if cost was no object...

      Personally, I'm pulling Cat5e in my house, but that's mainly because it is easy to access the walls from the attic of my single story home and cost *IS* an object of concern for me...

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    2. Re:same as before, use Cat5 by Miamicanes · · Score: 3, Interesting

      For INSIDE a house, fiber really is gross overkill. Most DATACENTERS don't even go all the way and use fiber for connections between devices in the same room. If you end up having to plug the fiber at both ends into an adapter box to turn it into gigabit wired ethernet, what have you *really* accomplished besides ego-masturbation and slightly increased latency due to two more conversion steps?

      It's like Toslink... everyone thinks it's the ultimate L33t way to run SPDIF signals between your player and amp, and both Monster Cable and Toshiba have done their best to reinforce that notion... except actually, it's not. If you look at real-world performance, Toslink positively BUTCHERS the signal, and turns it into metaphorical mush that Solomon-Reed error correction can *barely* keep up with and fix. Toslink falls over and dies with relatively short lengths where a video-grade RCA cable works flawlessly. Optical interconnects for signals running less than a hundred feet, or within a single room, are almost ALWAYS counterproductive. Toslink, like passive fiber interconnects in general, is one of those things that sounds really cool in theory, but ends up sucking in real life because you're taking something straightforward and making it 200 times more complicated than it has to be.

      Remember, 10-gigabit ethernet over copper ALREADY exists. It's not suitable for direct use, but with anticipated improvements to DSP technology, I think it's safe to say that when the day comes that you need to casually shovel 10gbps around your house, if push came to shove you'd be able to buy a pair of 10-gigE switches so you could multiplex the traffic of up to 10 gigabit devices into a single cat6 cable for up to a few hundred feet... at worst, using the same basic technology used to make VDSL work (just more wires operating in parallel to spread the work around).

  2. Re:Nothing... for several years by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wrong, it is something that should start shipping to end users within the end of this year. I should know, I am writing software that will ship this to the first bunch of OEMs around Feb. After that hopefully, in a couple of months, some APs should arrive in the market. And I am talking about enterprise, not just personal usage. 11ac is wanted desperately by the industry.