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Next Gen Wireless; 802.11ac

PostPosted: Fri Jan 03, 2014 1:42 am
by pam
Wifi technology has come a long way.....errrr....No it hasn't.

Draft 2.0 of wireless 802.11ac has been released.

Wifi-AC is the next gen wifi after N.

With N, current speeds have reached 450Mbps.

Wifi AC has already been implemented in HTC one X and Galaxy S4.
Both use the same chip-- BCM4335(Broadcom) manufactured on a 40nm node, delivering a speed of 433Mbps.

Apart from that the wifi spectrum uses the 2.4Ghz band and 5Ghz band.
2.4Ghz is for Wifi-N and below.
The 5Ghz band specifically targets wifi AC.

There are cheap dual band routers available for wifi N at a speed of 300Mbps.

300Mps is Ok for internet usage but not for LAN.

Wifi AC has speeds upto 1200Mbps for now. Future speeds will far exceed 2000Mbps.

Considering LTE networks are here to supersede 3G while obsoleting 2G and lower landline speeds have jumped upto 15Mbps implemeting Docsis 3.0 specs and IPv6 which is being pushed to replace IPv4; all this accelerating the implementation Wifi AC.

Router CPU's(for wifi N) are based on the MIPS architecture and a whole majority of them are manufactured by Qualcomm and using the same brand-- Atheros -- just as their ARM cousins.

The router's MIPS chips for wifi AC are dual cores having atleast 2 usb ports. Further allowing NAS+HTPC+cloud+LTE integration all built into the router. Maybe even connect a usb to hdmi adapter. Load balancing using multiple 3G modems has already been implemented( at least in openWRT). So definitely they are more power hungry, consuming 19V at 2Amps. It should also have web server capabilities and CMS/ web frameworks built into the firmware or aptly put OS. Future DDWRT and OpenWRT (both are linux based)should address these issues and implement them.

DDWRT and Openwrt are pretty powerful and is just like any power linux distro wherein you can install apps via the internet just as you would with any linux(ofcourse that means porting apps to the MIPS architecture.)

By 2015 1 billion devices are to be shipped with wifi AC; whereas wifi N device production will nose dive.

That being said; this ought to increase more E-waste if people were to throw away older equipment. Hopefully thanks to OpenWRT and DDWRT we could reuse it as range extenders or HTPC etc.

NOTE: Never throw away older networking equipment unless ofcourse they are 64kbps modems(both wireline and wireless broadband).

Re: Next Gen Wireless; 802.11ac

PostPosted: Fri Jan 03, 2014 12:02 pm
by ryanvade
Right now I am loving Wireless AC on my laptop. :D

EIDT:

A few router have broken the 1200Mbps speed barrier. These include Netgear's R6300 (300Mbps N and 1300Mbps AC, I own this one) and Netgear's R7000 (600Mbps N and 1300Mbps AC).