Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use | Hacker News Reader

Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

arstechnica.com

58 pointsLibertatea19 comments

"...with the downside of using frequencies that are easily blocked by walls. Even thin cubicle walls may block signals, Wilocity acknowledged. "

Not good for a house, but very useful for apartments in large buildings. You can have one wireless AP in each room (connected to eachother with wires), and almost no interference from the neighbours.

Is there no developing, competing standard that improves on current WiFi without these drawbacks?

802.11n on the 5GHz band (most implementations use 2.4GHz) already does this. The real problem is the 2.4GHz band, which is simply over-saturated. 2.4GHz also penetrates walls really well, which is a drawback in apartment situations because it introduces more interference from neighboring access points (and many other devices operating on or near the 2.4GHz frequency - wireless phones, microwaves, etc.).

I've used a 5GHz 802.11n AP in my last two apartments; it's worked great every time. Most of the time I don't even see any other access points in range. Even if there are other APs, 5GHz has many more frequency bands available, so avoiding interference is simple. The only drawback is that so many devices don't support 5GHz. My smartphone didn't until I upgraded to the SGS III, and my Nook still doesn't.

Also, 5GHz is faster because the spec allows 40MHz channels.

So would pushing for 5ghz N be better than 60ghz?

AC is 5GHz @ 1Gbs and it is already available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac

http://www.amazon.com/RT-AC66U-Dual-Band-Wireless-AC1750-Gig...

Yes, but it can also use several channels. This plus the AC standard becoming more popular will lead to overcrowding in 5 GHz also.

2.4 GHz has 3 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels.

5 GHz has about 23 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels.

Both go through walls, so you will get interference from neighbouring apartments no matter what technology you implement. The only solutions are to use a much higher frequency, or shield your apartment walls.

That quote is referring to the theoretical 7Gbps speed, not it's standard one.

It's actually the radio frequency itself that doesn't penetrate walls - it's not a bandwidth restriction, so it has nothing to do with theoretical throughput.

That's an asset for a lot of indoor applications, as it allows an independent cell in each room, meaning minimal loss of data capacity due to interference between cells in the same band. You need an access point for each room, but that's okay once the hardware is cheap. For new installations, one can wire a building for data, analogous to wiring for lighting, with access points in place of luminaries. Eventually we will see light fittings with inbuilt 60GHz access points? The usage scenario for 60GHz is similar to infrared. The main advantage of 60GHz being that it able to penetrate a wider range of materials, thus offering better coverage.

It will be interesting to see what the patent landscape is for this. I'm hopeful that it will be largely unencumbered, so will become mainstream quickly. The basic system was defined 15-20 years ago, as OFDM based WLAN was always intended to operate in the 60GHz bands [1]. For the last 15-20 years its been a case of waiting for (cheap) radio technology to catch up with, and enable, the original WLAN vision.

[1] http://www.sss-mag.com/pdf/97_mmlan.pdf

As nice as the speed is, I think the real application is docking stations for mobile devices - think iPhone, android, etc. I take my mobile device with me, put it near a wigi router and all of a sudden I have a wireless keyboard mouse monitors etc all hooked up. No wires required. No setup, nothing!! Very cool for portability!! My friend comes over and they just bring their devices to the table and were using another mobile device fully integrated. The mobile device is a portable brain. Very cool!!

You could even automtically hook up your phone to your tv, etc. no wires needed. As long as your phone carries everything, it can be hooked up to anything automatically when you step into a room!

When my computer is not connected to the Internet, I don't have my Wikipedia with me. But when I bring it near my wireless router, suddenly it's all accessible again!

I'm looking forward to this. I have two great rooms that may have a dozen active devices at any moment. I'm ok with the single-room applications for both of these common areas.

I can imagine a lot of similar places in offices. Cubicles could have antanae attached or be made of a material that is more willing to reflect the beams; much easier than pulling wires.

>I have two great rooms that may have a dozen active devices at any moment.

If any of them are stationary, or mostly stationary, you might just want to run an ethernet cable. Even long ones are dirt cheap from Monoprice. For instance, I wired my iMac, my girlfriend's iMac, and leave a wire at our kitchen table, where laptops are most likely to be used, for about $12 shipped.

Transferring video files between machines is now fast, and we don't have interference from neighboring networks (or vice-versa). Ethernet also makes using distributed processing using Compressor (http://documentation.apple.com/en/compressor/usermanual/inde...) easy.

> If any of them are stationary, or mostly stationary, you might just want to run an ethernet cable. Even long ones are dirt cheap from Monoprice. For instance, I wired my iMac, my girlfriend's iMac, and leave a wire at our kitchen table, where laptops are most likely to be used, for about $12 shipped.

I think the issue for most is not the cost of the cables, but the inconvenience (and safety hazard!) of having cables running around the house. They also typically tend to look untidy.

For me it'a a decision between a wireless router (which I would need anyway) for $180-odd or an additional $200-$300 to get CAT6 wired up to two (2) rooms in the house w/ 2 sockets per faceplate (and a cheap switch to aggregate it all).

>w/ 2 sockets per faceplate (and a cheap switch to aggregate it all).

Oh—we just run it along baseboards and tape the cords in place.

The finished part of my house is completely wired with cat-5, but devices are becoming much less likely to even have an ethernet port, much less to be sitting around in a single place for it.

Of the dozen devices in my room right now, six are able to be connected and, of those, four are.

This isn't 'wifi'. 60GHz is not practical for general purpose wireless data connections. It's a 7Gbit wireless link, which will be great for beaming something to your TV, or for a wireless bridge link between two buildings, or any of myriad other specific use cases. We don't need that much bandwidth on our wifi, and we certainly don't need the tradeoffs.

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