The wireless win

LET’S FACE IT -- the world needs more bandwidth & speed when it comes to our networks. Whether it’s on a government level, or within various corporations, or inside your very own home or enterprise, this need blatantly exists. We all want private wireless networks and we want them to handle data-intensive tasks such as video streaming and hard drive back up. To address all of these needs, we now have the latest and greatest local wireless standard -- 802.11ac. This standard offers some distinct advantages over the 802.11n wireless gear that you’re probably using today and, putting aside the nitty gritty details for now, the bottom line is speed. But don’t assume that you are going to get a Gigabit of throughput necessarily.

802.11ac was first developed to optimize video streaming experiences. Providing gigabit Wi-Fi speeds allows for content to download faster and large video or music files to sync more quickly. With an increasing number of Wi-Fi devices in the home and greater Internet consumption, this new wireless draft 802.11ac standard will help meet your digital lifestyle demands. As your devices and Wi-Fi usage increases, utilizing 802.11ac technology could help you get the most out of your connected experiences.

For instance, an 802.11ac wireless modem talking to an 802.11ac-enabled PC, notebook, tablet or smartphone can deliver two to three times the volume per second of data and, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s done by 802.11ac running exclusively in the 5GHz frequency band, which is far less cluttered and competitive than the 2.4GHz band today’s wireless gear mostly inhabits. Now, like most things, there are pros and cons to this. The good news about that is that there’s far more room in that frequency band than there is in the over-used 2.4GHz band. The bad news is that a 5GHz signal has less range.

802.11ac has another neat feature called beam-forming that gets around the general 5GHz range problem. For the Wi-Fi access point in your office today, the signal is omnidirectional, thus forming a communications sphere around the device. With 802.11ac the signal is broadcast directly from the access point to a specific device and back again. Beam-forming also makes use of the fact that modern access points are fitted with multiple antennas, whether they be internal or external. That allows them to detect where your pad or PC is positioned relative to the access point, and use this locational information to focus the wireless power in the direction of the user’s device.

TV transmitters and most current wireless units simply radiate signal evenly in every direction in case there’s a receiver there to catch it so essentially it’s an arbitrary way to use broadcast power. Another attribute to note is that the 802.11ac standard can support up to eight antennas, which is twice 802.11n’s capability. Faster antennas coupled with beam-forming running in 5GHz spectrum adds up to a very significant speed advantage.

802.11ac achieves its raw speed increase by implementing more channel bonding, increased from the maximum of 40 MHz in 802.11n, and now up to 80 or even 160 MHz (for 117% or 333% speed-ups, respectively). It also has denser modulation using 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), up from 802.11n’s 64QAM (for a 33% speed burst at shorter, yet still usable, ranges). Finally, it has more multiple input, multiple output (MIMO). 802.11ac goes all the way to eight (for another 100% speed-up) whereas 802.11n stopped at four spatial streams.

The IEEE 802.11 Working Group has completed its work on IEEE draft P802.11ac/D7.0, and the draft is expected to be approved as an IEEE standard in December, 2013. Many pre-standard products are already available in the marketplace, and they are certified for compliance with the draft by the Wi-Fi Alliance (www.wifi.org). Today you can purchase “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ ac” smart phones, tablets, laptops, access points, routers and enterprise switches. Note that Wi-Fi CERTIFIED is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance.

802.11ac essentially takes something great and makes it even better. It’s a faster and more scalable version of 802.11n and couples the freedom of wireless with the capabilities of Gigabit Ethernet. Wireless LAN sites will see significant improvements in the number of clients supported by an access point, a better experience for each client, and more available bandwidth for a higher number of parallel video streams. Even when the network is not fully loaded, users see a benefit because their file downloads and email sync happen at low-lag gigabit speeds. Also, device battery life is extended, since the device’s Wi-Fi interface can wake up, exchange data with its access point, then revert to dozing that much more quickly. Sounds like a wireless-win-win-win for all.