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802.11n Finalized After 7 Years in the Making
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After seven years, it's finally done.
Many of your newer Wi-Fi enabled devices may already have it, and you've probably been hearing about it for the last seven years, but the IEEE has finally ratified the standard for 802.11n – which some have just come to know it as Wireless-N.
This means that manufacturers of Wireless-N devices now have a finalized-specification to design their products to. Existing Wireless-N hardware will likely support the final spec with just a software update.
“This was an extraordinarily wide-ranging technical challenge that required the sustained effort and concentration of a terrific variety of participants. When we started in 2002, many of the technologies addressed in 802.11n were university research topics and had not been implemented,” said Bruce Kraemer, Chair of the IEEE Wireless LAN Working Group. “The performance improvements achieved via IEEE 802.11n stand to transform the WLAN user experience, and ratification of the amendment sets the stage for a new wave of application innovation and creation of new market opportunities.”
More than 400 individuals from equipment and silicon suppliers, service providers, systems integrators, consultant organizations and academic institutions from more than 20 countries participated in a seven-year effort leading to IEEE 802.11n’s ratification. Publication of the amendment is scheduled for mid-October.
Source : Tom's Hardware US
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Holiday Buyer's Guide 2006, Part 2: Networking
Netgear RangeMax 240 Wireless Router + 4-port... (9 offers) Online shop Price See more products What? You haven't finished your holiday shopping yet? Well, in case you've been considering a networking-related gift, there are many products that are sure to please your giftee. This guide to networking gifts is based on hands-on experience with products reviewed throughout the year, and links are included to the related reviews and articles for your further exploration. You'll also find some tips on what not to buy, a bit unusual for a gift guide, perhaps, but equally important. You all know the drill and why you're here, so let's just get right to it. Wireless Networking Wi-Fi continues its march toward ubiquity despite crowded airwaves, flaky performance, over-hyped products and generally high buyer dissatifaction. But if you're determined to try to free yourself or a loved one from his or her cabled shackles, we have a few things to suggest. First, stay away from any products using draft 802.11n technology. Despite all the hype to the contrary, this standard is far from done and many significant changes are still coming. As our reviews have shown, these products generally promise long, deliver short and will interfere with nearby networks. And if that isn't enough, only one manufacturer - ASUS - is guaranteeing upgradability to the final 802.11n spec when it is released sometime next year. In their efforts to differentiate themselves, manufacturers have come up will all sorts of permutations on the "N" theme, making it difficult for the average consumer to know what he or she is really buying. So here's a partial list of draft 11n "marketingese" so that you know what to avoid: RangeMax NEXT (Netgear) RangeBooster N (D-Link) N1 (Belkin) Wireless N-Draft (Trendnet) Wireless-N (Linksys) With that said, you'll get the best combination of range and performance from products using MIMO chipsets from Airgo. Airgo's first-generation "True MIMO" chipset is at the heart of the Belkin Pre-N and other routers. But instead of the Belkin, which is short on routing features, a better choice would be the Netgear WPNT834 RangeMax 240. Although the 240 uses Airgo's third-generation chipset that includes "ACE" technology, which can interfere with neighboring 802.11b/g networks, you can shut it off and still have a product that will keep both you and your wireless neighbors happy. Netgear WPNT834 RangeMax 240 Wireless Router Join our discussion on this topic
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Ever since the days when 802.11a/g grew a second antenna, we’ve had “transmit/receive diversity,” which sends the same data stream out over multiple antennas and simply lets the access point select whichever antenna is receiving the best signal. Applied to 802.11n, transmit diversity used multiple antennas to help increase range and better deal with difficult locations. This is why 11n does a generally better job than 11a/g at eliminating dead spots. However, 802.11n equipment got another jump in intelligence with the addition of maximal ratio combining (MRC). This technology combines multiple antenna signals in such a way that strong signals are multiplied while weak signals are attenuated. The signals you want get boosted, while those you don’t have their power cut. MRC is built into all 802.11n chips. Now, as you might expect, the receiving end can play an important role in optimizing chip-based beamforming. With 802.11a/g, access points could listen to the client and use rudimentary MRC analysis to boost power along the best-suited beam, providing a gain of roughly 1 to 2 dB. The catch here is that the access point was doing all the work. There was no active feedback coming from the 802.11a/g clients. With “implicit beamforming,” wherein an 802.11n AP is communicating with 802.11n clients, you can have some feedback. Rather than having the access point perform all of the signal analysis, it can query the client and see if it agrees that this or that particular beam orientation is optimal. Having this limited two-way communication yields a maximum of 3 dB additional gain, but the bad news is that there are currently no products on today’s market supporting implicit beamforming. With “explicit beamforming,” feedback between the AP and client happens much more frequently. This way, if a client moves or an antenna gets adjusted or anything happens to alter the dynamics of the signal strengths, the system is able to adapt almost instantaneously to a new, optimized configuration. Again, having the client involved in this way can yield up to a 3 dB benefit with two radios, but there are no products available today offering this capability. Hopefully this will change. See more products D-Link DGL-4500 Xtreme N Gaming... Dell Home $199.99 Buydig.com $179.99 Newegg.com $149.99 PC Connection $185.95 ElectronicsPLUS $186.99
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Turning the Knob on Bandwidth The current wireless card going into Centrino notebooks is the WiFi Link 4965AGN PCIe — by all standards, a solid representation of the latest networking technology. The benefits of 802.11n are still in draft form; the task group has approved draft 4.0 and is now working on draft 5.0, so who knows when we’ll see a concrete standard. Nevertheless, Intel is revamping its entire lineup of wireless notebook adapters for Centrino 2 with four new models. The WiFi Link 5100 and WiFi Link 5300 should be available within the next month, while the WiMAX/WiFi Link 5150 and WiMAX/WiFi Link 5350 will go on sale later this year. The difference between the first two and second pair is, of course, WiMAX support. When we asked Intel about the readiness of WiMAX infrastructure to give the 5x50 cards some value, its response was: “WiMAX provides much wider Internet and phone voice coverage, and unlike Wi-Fi, has the ability to unwire entire cities or communities, [ensuring connectivity] even when on the move. Intel is working with service providers around the world to deploy WiMAX networks, with initial U.S. network availability starting later this year from Sprint XOHM and Clearwire.” In other words, even if Centrino 2 were immediately available with WiMAX hardware, it’d idle until the wireless networks came online in your area. What, then, is there left to add to the Wi-Fi-only cards that’ll make notebook vendors want to spend as much as $30 on them? Well, according to Intel, the new wireless offerings are going to zero in on three things. First, there should be a big step up in performance. The entry-level WiFi Link 5100 is expected to receive files at up to 300 Mb/s using a 2x1 MIMO configuration. The higher-end WiFi Link 5300 gets a claimed 450 Mb/s using a 3x3 antenna setup. Incidentally, the 4965AGN should also deliver up to 300 Mb/s, putting the 5100 on par. We’re going to assume that Intel is employing the same technology that Marvell uses to get 450 Mb/s out of three sub-streams with its TopDog 11n-450. It isn’t clear whether or not you’d need a router built on a particular draft of the 802.11n specification to take advantage of the faster data rate, though. Intel is also shooting for power savings with the new 5000-series WiFi Link cards. It cites consumption numbers at idle, associated with a network, at less than 25 mW. It also claims to offer significant reductions in power consumption and increases in power efficiency, but fails to provide the data to support those percentage increases. Finally, the new WiFi Link cards include support for Active Management Technology 4.0, helping tie Centrino 2 into Intel’s more enterprise-oriented vision. A notebook boasting Centrino 2 with vPro technology includes the Core 2 Duo chip with Virtualization Technology, a Mobile 45 Express Chipset with the ICH9M-Enhanced controller (a $5 BOM increase), the 82567LM Gigabit chip with AMT 4.0 support, one of the new WiFi Link cards with AMT 4.0 support and a Trusted Platform Module v1.2. With all of those pieces in place, IT administrators can manage wireless clients, even if they’re powered off. We’ve seen this functionality for a while now on wired systems, but it’s brand new in the notebook space. With that said, only the enterprise folks will really care about its implementation. Intel hasn’t yet started talking about pricing on the 5x50 cards with WiMAX support, but we can’t help but think that they’re the biggest piece of this Centrino 2 story. All of the other components really just represent incremental improvements, but WiMAX is completely new. If you’re going to spend a grand on a notebook that won’t be replaced for another couple of years, it really makes sense to wait and see how the metropolitan networking technology unfolds in the next six months.









Sounds to me like 7 years of to many cooks in the kitchen.
But were already talking about how 802.11 sucks and newer standards will takeover...
Finally! haha
Good thing they didn't want to make a better mouse trap. That would only take 200 countries participants as all have mice.
I have this with my router and I can get the advertised speeds, unliked b or g. So, im talking 130Mbps. My router has it set to auto, and as soon as it recognises the wifi card only supports b and g, it will automatically go back down to 54mbps, but its still awesome to see the possibility of 130Mbps. Who know's maybe we will see the theoretical speeds of 300Mbps.
Current Consumer net, is around 24Mbps, so even at 300Mbps, you wouldnt see much difference there, but with file transfers and using the net, wifi wont be as intermittant as it currently is.
Very little changed in the standard for the last 2 and a half years, they could have launched it a year ago and already been working on 802.11P.
Cat-5 cable please XD
Finally!
It's like IEEE took information from Microsoft's Vista production playbook.
Thank jebus. The wireless situation in many neighborhoods like mine are bad. Two city wide wireless services, plus a dozen wireless routers most of which seem to be the rangemax and boosted type routers all on rotating channels make finding an optimal channel impossible. So much wireless noise.
It's about time!
For the experts here...does this mean anything for all of the 802.11n products that have been released up until now?
Wireless n sucks, next please
Finally... I had gone to a technical school as a sophomore when I heard rumors of the standard. I had graduated highschool when I bought a b/g router cause I didn't want to shell out money for a draft-n. I went through college and studied a bit about draft-n. I graduated college and my parents got att u-verse (att supplied a wireless router) and gave me back the router I had bought for them (US Robotics). Now I am married and have my own place, and have the router sitting on the shelf. Unused now, but reminding me that it served its purpose, and didn't cost a fortune.
My point is: I don't think I have ever known or will know a technology that has taken so long to get ratified. Yeah, the theories were there. The draft products beta'd the different implementations testing how products would react to each other so that they could maximize compatibility (aka, some members pushed their idea as best, because their draft product already supported it). I'm glad for N to be done, but only because it annoyed me of how long it took.
will there be any negative effects, like less far broadcasting (weaker transmission signal) or other negative effects of applying an update to an existing wireless-n device?
its about time this happened
Wow someone really is given out bad ratings to people bad mouthing the IEEE for taking a long time or the newly standard N would be the late forgotten standard soon.
7 years is a long time in the technological world, but so many people and organizations wanted to add their 2-cents into it and prolonged the ratification.
However how I see it, if companies are force to update existing firmware to accommodate to the newly-standard, then more ideas towards firmware modding, less signal noise, and a migration from B/G to N.
All in all a plus for the technical world...
Good thing they finalized it....right toward the end of it's life.
So in 7 years we've had a 5.5x improvement in theoretical maximum speeds. That's pitiful. This should have been ratified 4 years ago at the latest.
hah.... windows 7 took 7 years and there is no improvement whatsoever
I currently see close to 300mbps when using an "N" receiver. I have a belkin n1 vision router. As far as speed I have a netbook at home which every one knows doesn't have an internal optical drive so I networked it with my main pc. When sharing data betweens computers you really see wireless "g" left in the dust. Also When using "n" my range is alot more stable at further distances.
Hell it's about time.
Cat-5 cable please XD
Go Cat6, it's supposed to support up to 10Gbps
Because the most of us will probably say "so ... what does that change?", here is an article about the differences between draft 2.0 and the final version.
Took just as long as SATA III (3)
OMG! I thought this day would never come.
Because the most of us will probably say "so ... what does that change?", here is an article about the differences between draft 2.0 and the final version.
"But, overall, it’s the same 11n that has been here for the last two years, just better written."
OK, so no miraculous fix to the disconnect problem I have between my Linksys and Netgear N equipment? Thanks loads...
OK, so no miraculous fix to the disconnect problem I have between my Linksys and Netgear N equipment? Thanks loads...
The specs might not be to blame, the implementation might be.
While it's nice to finally have the 802.11n protocol formalized, IEEE really needs to get on the stick. This industry moves WAY too fast for them to take 7 years to ratify a new protocol.
BUT CAN THESE ROUTERS PLAY CRYSIS????
BUT CAN THESE ROUTERS PLAY CRYSIS????
jeezzz... stop with these "can it play crysis" comments. it's getting old.
once was funny, twice is ok, over three times is just plain stuiped.
anyway....
yeah IEEE need to speed up that stuff.