Wifi - the next Generation
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007A bit like Mr Spock and the Star Trek generation, Wifi is moving inexerably forwards. IEEE have recently ratified the 2.0 draft of 802.11n and while it is not set to become an official inked-in standard until next summer, you can be sure of seeing a lot of draft ‘n’ 2.0 networking kit on the market this year.
The previous high performance standard, 802.11g offered up to 54mbps in theory but around half of this in practice. The new 802.11′n’ has the potential to deliver up to four times the throughput and up to twice the range of 802.11g.
This has already been used to some extent to boost speeds and range for 802.11g solutions, so it is not entirely new technology, but previous efforts have been more or less proprietary. Now that we have an almost defined standard it should be easier to make it deliver the higher performance with less tinkering.
It has been designed to allow some room for growth. Vendors can use the 2.4Ghz spectrum at speeds of up to 300MBps, but if they choose to, can also make use of the 5Ghz frequence and drive devices at speeds of up to 300 Mbps. Using bonding techniques, speeds of up to 600Mbps are feasible.
This of course means that we all be able to work twice as fast as we do at the moment - Oh Joy!
