802.11ac

Streaming high-definition video wirelessly throughout your home will be a major benefit of Wi-Fi 802.11ac in the next few years, says NPD In-Stat.

Expected to receive final approval by the IEEE toward the end of this year, 802.11ac will boast several improvements over 802.11n. The new wireless flavor will offer speeds surpassing 1 gigabit per second, almost three times that of 802.11n. It also promises to provide better coverage throughout an entire home with fewer dead spots.

From a technical standpoint, the new standard will use such technologies as beamforming and higher amplitude modulation to send … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Despite the scariest cross-wind landing I have ever experienced, when arriving in Las Vegas last Saturday, CES 2012 panned out mostly smoothly, with no unpleasant surprises.

As predicted, 802.11ac was big at CES 2012, while Thunderbolt and cloud-based services proved to be on the rise.

Though there were no working 802.11ac (or 5G Wi-Fi as the technology is called by BroadCom) devices at the show (all products showcased here were just mock-ups or nonfunctioning prototypes), every single networking vendor I talked with--such as TrendNet, BroadCom, Cisco, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, and Buffalo--committed to offering 802.11ac devices … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- D-Link said today at CES 2012 that it fully supports and is ready for the new era of Wi-Fi that's based on the new 802.11ac standard.

This resonates with the announcements of TrendNet, Cisco, Broadcom and other networking vendors. D-Link doesn't have any 802.11ac products to demo or showcase at the show, however.

The 802.11ac standard the upgrade to the existing 802.11n specification (known as wireless N) and is considered to be the wireless standard for the "post-PC era" of data connectivity. This is because over time, the number … Read more

Trendnet, a vendor of affordable and green networking products, announced today the first 802.11ac networking products to be showcased at CES 2012.

As introduced by networking chip-maker, Broadcom, recently, the 802.11ac wireless standard is the next generation of the 802.11 wireless technology with the 802.11n (or wireless N) currently being the mainstream. The new standard will initially offer up to 1300Mbps speed (compared to the top 450Mbps of the existing N standard), with the capability to scale up to 6.8Gbps in the future.

The new AC standard also uses the low 5Ghz band and incorporates … Read more

Following a CES preview event last month, Broadcom today announced its first family of 802.11ac (also known as 5G Wi-Fi) chips, designed for a broad range of product segments.

The chipmaker says the new IEEE 802.11ac chips are three times faster and up to six times more efficient than equivalent existing 802.11n (known as Wi-Fi) solutions. This makes 5G Wi-Fi a major step up from the existing and popular 802.11a/b/g/n wireless solutions.

According to Broadcom, its 5G Wi-Fi chips will dramatically improve wireless range and data rates, allowing consumers to watch HD video, and transfer large amounts of data to and from more devices, in more places at once.

The fact that the chips make it possible to transmit a much larger amount of data than 802.11n devices in the same amount of time means that 5G Wi-Fi devices can enter low-power mode faster and more frequently, resulting in significant reductions in power consumption.… Read more

Your wireless network at home, and possibly in your car, is about to get a huge dose of networking supercharge.

In a pre-CES meeting with the press today, Broadcom, maker of chipsets that power popular networking devices, unveiled its plan for the new Wi-Fi specification, called 802.11ac, and demoed its new development in in-car Ethernet cabling technology.

The 802.11ac specification--an industry wireless networking standard confirmed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) back in January--is the upgrade to the existing 802.11n specification and is considered by Broadcom to be the standard for the "post-PC era" of data connectivity. Broadcom cited a report saying that currently 55 percent of wireless clients are non-PC, which includes game consoles, set-top boxes, and mobile devices.

Unlike 802.11n, which is available in both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, the new 802.11ac uses only the 5GHz band and incorporates many standardized techniques that help greatly increase both the data rates and wireless range. It's also backward-compatible with 802.11n clients. According to Rahul Patel, vice president of Broadcom's Mobile and Wireless Group, Broadcom's new 802.11ac chips will offer the following benefits.… Read more

If all goes according to Wilocity's plan, the startup's dream of high-speed wireless networking will take a crucial step toward reality in January.

That's because Wilocity, which is leading the charge for next-generation technology called 802.11ad designed to reach 7 gigabits per second over short distances, plans to show off a variety of devices using its technology at the mammoth CES trade show that month.

"We'll be able to show you what your life would be like on 60GHz," said Mark Grodzinsky, Wilocity's vice president of marketing. He predicts that the first … Read more

Wi-Fi has joined a short list of technologies such as USB, x86, HDMI, and PCI to spread successfully across the computing industry and beyond. So what do you do for an encore?

Duh. You get faster. This is the computer industry we're talking about here, after all.

Wi-Fi, the marketing-friendly term for the 802.11 family of wireless networking standards, got its mainstream start with 802.11b with a data-transfer speed of 11 megabits per second. Next came 802.11g at 54Mbps, then the present fastest standard, 802.11n with a top speed of 450Mbps.

But under development now … Read more

People in the technology world just now adjusting to the arrival of 802.11n should begin bracing themselves for 802.11ac.

For those who can't keep up with the alphanumeric jumbles that are technology standards, 802.11n is at the moment the fastest version of Wi-Fi. The arrival of 802.11n was delayed by interminable standards wrangling--thus the profusion of "Draft N" wireless routers--and research firm In-Stat already predicts its faster successor, 802.11ac, soon will surge into the market.

From zero 802.11ac devices this year and the first ones next year--the standard isn't done yet… Read more