Wireless Networking Need To Know 2006

Just looking for general comments on the article. Did you learn anything? What info were you looking for that you didn't find?

Thanks for the feedback. As I said, I feel wireless product manufacturers are selling snake oil when they push 2.4GHz products for video streaming. Throwing throughput at the problem isn't going to help, especially in high interference environments.

I strongly recommend you try 802.11a if you're going to even attempt to stream video. Dual band products have come down a bit, but you'll still pay a premium for the shot at a better RF environment.

The guys over at HD Beat have a couple of good articles describing their attempts at wireless HD streaming:

HDTV over WiFi: tips and tricks
http://www.hdbeat.com/2005/12/15/h [...] pressions/

HDTV over WiFi: 802.11a helps
http://www.hdbeat.com/2005/12/21/h [...] fi-80211a/
and one trying HomePlug Turbo:

Netgear XE104 not ready for HDTV Primetime
http://www.hdbeat.com/2006/02/02/n [...] primetime/

Worth a read!

Great article, but you might want to add a few things.. (unless they were there and I missed them).

Wireless access point are only Half-Duplex.. and when one person is broadcasting, everybody else is listening (cdma/ca). That is why the connection can be slow sometimes. The more active clients you have, the slower it gets.

A small problem with the 802.11a is that it's located in the 5GHZ range, and it tends to be stopped more easily by obstacle.. the Higher it gets in the frequency range, the more easily it will be affected by diverse materials. (Exactly as sounds, Bass will go through walls, while normal sounds gets stopped by them). It's not THAT much of a problem, but it's still there.

You might also want to say that 802.11b has only 3 non overlapping channels (they say there is 11, but only 3 of them are not overlapping), because each of them is 22mhz wide, so it's easier for 802.11b to get affected by interference.

802.11A and G has a definite advantage there since they both use OFDM. Each Channel is 20 MHz wide and is broken up into 52 subchannels (48 for data, 4 for error correction), each approximately 300 KHz wide.

Cheers!

Kiltak
<a href="http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com">[Geeks Are Sexy] Tech. News</a>

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