Open-Mouthed Amazement
You should have seen my wife’s face when she found me glued to the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. “No, honey, come here!” I said, my face aglow with the bikini-clad pixels of Tyra and Heidi Klum. “You’ve got to see this!”
Arms crossed. Pursed lips. “Mm-hmm. Yes?”
I pointed at the laptop on the counter in front of me. “Not the models. The video. It’s high-def with a 19.2 megabits per second stream rate. Looks perfect, like HDTV, right?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Now turn around.” I pointed at the plasma screen on the wall pulling a different part of the same video, a second stream at 18.4 Mbps, through our Xbox 360 with an attached 802.11n bridge. “That’s almost 40 megabits streaming over WiFi. I’ve never even been able to do one stream before, and now we’ve got two!”
My wife looked at the screens, looked back to me, and shrugged. “OK, then. I’ll leave you and the girls to it. Have fun.”
She walked away and slammed the front door. I don’t think she actually cared if I was having fun. Strange. Clearly, she didn’t understand that something amazing had fallen into my lap. Actually, let me rephrase that. Something incredible had happened to my network. With an access point clear across the house, transmitting through one floor and three or four walls, coping with literally a dozen interfering WiFi networks surrounding the house, I was getting wireless network performance unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
This was my first experience with beamforming, something I’d only seen vague mention of on long-term WiMAX roadmaps. But here it was in an 802.11n access point from a company I’d never heard of, and it blew away everything I’d ever seen a wireless product do before.
Interested? Then let’s dig in. I may not have runway models to offer you, but I still think you’ll be impressed.
