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

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."

Comments

same as before, use Cat5

[alen]

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.

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[GameboyRMH]

Cat5 (or Cat6e if you want futureproofing) is just better for any device that doesn't move.

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[Ost99]

Range on 5GHz tends to be limited by walls etc. so you should get less interference / overlapping with 5GHz inside your own house / apartment.

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[h4rr4r]

This, 100 times this. If you have a device that is not being moved, run a wire. It is not hard to do nor is it expensive if you need to pay someone.

In the vast majority if not all states, even renters can do this provided the seal the holes back up when they leave. No matter what the contract states. Check your local laws before doing this of course.

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[afidel]

Cat6 (there is no e) does nothing to help you futureproof, you need cat6a to do 10Gb as cat6 never made it into any spec (there was a draft version of 10GBaseT that allowed cat6 to 55m without AXT or 37m with AXT but it was not ratified)

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[GameboyRMH]

Seal holes? Pay people? I just pull wires from one room to another, as a bonus it makes your house look cyberpunk as all hell.

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[buybuydandavis]

If you're going to wire, wire with the best available. It's just crazy to cheap out on the wire, when the installation is the major cost/hassle.

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[bobbied]

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...

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[operagost]

And regardless of whether you cheap out or not, always pull a piece of twine along with the cables so that you can pull new ones later.

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[jandrese]

Not that running at .59c vs. .99c matters in the least when your entire cable run is 50m. In this case, copper will be faster anyway because converting from copper to optical and back takes time, and nobody has a pure-optical machine yet.

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[cawpin]

I would but crawling through a solid concrete slab is very difficult.

Re:same as before, use Cat5

[Miamicanes]

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).

Re:Nothing... for several years

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

5cm Ham Band

[Rob Riggs]

Looks like they are adding more channels in the 5cm ham band. Good for getting access to cheap equipment that can be modded for amateur radio use. Bad because of the added interference.

Re:5cm Ham Band

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Very bad since the entire 5650-5925 MHz amateur radio allocation is included in the WiFi announcement.

Bad for experiment and hobbyist that uses the band. Bad for the industry because the proposal will meet opposition.

Also there is a lot of hand waving on the "Dynamic Frequency Selection" channels and how they will enforce minimal interference to weather radar.

Re:5 GHz is shit!

[h4rr4r]

That is half the point. We have so many wifi access points now that limiting how far it propagates is a feature not a bug.

If you are not moving a device it should get a wire.

Re:But

[bobbied]

Unlikely this will have better range than 2.4Ghz. 5Ghz is attenuated a lot more than 2.4Ghz by walls, plants and such.

The good news though will be that with an expanded available spectrum, speeds will go up. Higher attenuation and lower usable distances will help with crowded environments. But I don't think the available range will be greater than 2.4Ghz equipment.

Re:Stepping backwards?

[Moses48]

Not to be pedantic, but I think I should clarify that 2.4Ghz has a longer wavelength. The longer wavelength penetrates walls better.

Re:5 GHz is shit!

[IndustrialComplex]

I agree on the wifi range. I have literally no need for my wireless to extend more than 10' from walls of my house, yet I am picking up networks at approximately -70 to -80dBm which must be from neighbors at least 40-50' from my router.

However, I often cannot run wires to the locations where I keep some PCs due to odd architectural issues. First, I rent a house, so drilling holes isn't an easy option. (I can patch the walls, but I'd rather avoid the labor) Second, the house is on a slab, so going through the basement/crawlspace isn't an option.

Right now, wireless works VERY well for me in getting an internet connection to a PC housed in the kitchen cabinets for running music/looking up recipes while cooking. There isn't anything I need to do on that PC which requires anything more than 1-2 Mbps. For a HTPC, opting for the tricker wired installation is usually better, but wired isn't always better for every stationary situation.