News and Reviews....
Go Faster with WiFi June 2011
By Bob Lieto
Being in the micro-chip design industry past, I remember a rule of thumb that chip geometries half their size and increase their speed by 1.8 just about every 12-18 months, which brings me to a recent article on the new family of wireless network standards.
Wi-Fi, the marketing-friendly term for 802.11 family of wireless networking standards, got its mainstream start with 802.11b with a transfer speed of 11 megabits per second. Next came 802.11g at 54 Mbps, then present fastest standard, 802.11n with a top speed of 450 Mbps.
Currently under development are two new versions: 80211ac at 1 gigabit per second and 802.11ad at 7 Gbps. Those speeds are good enough to open a major new market of wireless streaming video, likely in 2012 - 2013. Both will bring a very high throughput and have big impact in the entertainment and streaming industries, including smart phones, cars and TV. But, wait a minute..... the standards are not done as yet and getting a standard in place can set back the release by years.
One market group forecasts that a billion 802.11ac devices will ship in 2015. Knowing that the broader WiFi spreads,. the more complicated it becomes to determine its future. The 802.11 family of standards is developed at the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Another organization the WiFi Alliance, involved for about 11 years now, add the sticker" WiFi" to the device and assures that it tested to work with other devices. WiFi Alliance has certified more than 10,000 products so far.
You might be asking yourself why set a standard for an 802.11ac if 802.11 ad goes 7 times faster. The answer is that the 802.11ac will have a greater range due to the physics of data at higher frequency. The 802.11b and 802.11g use the 2.4 Gigahertz frequency spectrum, it shares with cordless phones, noise from microwave ovens and various other nuisances. In comparison, 802.11n can use a combination of 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. The 802.11ac uses 5 GHz solely and 802.11ad uses the higher 60 GHz spectrum leaving room to pack different communication channels side by side.
Signals in general do not propagate far at all. They are absorbed by water, air and walls. It looks like 802.11ac is destined to be the successor to mainstream networking access point technology used in homes, business and WiFi hot spots. With 1 Gbps in 802.11ac it is not unlikely that 3 streams of lightly compressed HD video channels could be streamed at the same time. 802.11ad promises video as well but its' got enough capacity for uncompressed HD Video.
What is interesting is that 802.11ac and 802.11ad get associated with in-home video, but won't do much for most connections to the internet because broadband Internet connections for most are well below 54 Mbps of 802.11g and a fast in home network won't speed up the broadband bottleneck.
The biggest question of 802.11ac and 802.11ad face is how smoothly they'll be standardized. Companies in the market have been demonstrating their approaches, but what could happen is the 802.11n problem, where the two camps could not agree on a direction and the WiFi Alliance ended up certifying "Draft N" devices to get the market moving and in September 2009, 802.11n finally arrived
Comment ..... In a quest to go farther, faster, stronger and better, technology moves on.
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Past Articles on Subject:
Moca Saves The Day March 2011
Cable Biz November 2007
Digital Cable, See It Now or Not May 2007
Cable in Reverse April 2004
