Although it wasn't ratified until September, the 802.11n wireless networking standard has been around for quite some time. In fact, the seven-year journey to ratification officially involved more than 400 individuals ranging from equipment and silicon suppliers, service providers, systems integrators, consultant organizations, and academic institutions from more than 20 countries.
After reading that this de facto standard was now in fact an actual standard I asked Jay Botelho, director of product management at network monitoring and troubleshooting vendor WildPackets, if becoming a true standard means anything to the industry and the vendors that support it.
Q: What are the benefits of 802.11n?
Jay Botelho: The biggest benefit by far is more throughput--significantly more throughput--from a theoretical maximum of 54Mbps to 600Mbps with the right hardware configuration. It is this leap in throughput that makes applications like Voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) and even video over wireless feasible. It is also the reason why the claim is being made that 11n will drive more new installations to be wireless-only.
I wouldn't go so far as to say 11n is more viable than cable--each has its pros and cons. Cable (wired) handles unlimited users without effecting throughput, while wireless is shared - the more users the less throughput each one gets. On the other hand wireless is far less expensive and easier to deploy so this is a key benefit in new construction.
802.11n has been around forever it seems. Realistically, will ratification translate to a surge in deployments?
Botelho: Many enterprises held off with 11n upgrades (and therefore wireless upgrades in general) for fear that the ratified spec would be substantially different from the Draft2.0 spec (the one the Wi-Fi Alliance based its pre-ratification certification tests on). Now that this question is no longer an issue, and since there's probably some pent-up demand since wireless upgrades in general may have been put on hold, it is expected that there will be a surge in deployments. As an aside, there is very little difference between the Draft2.0 version and the ratified version.
I heard an interesting story from the guys at WildPackets, a provider of network and application performance monitoring, analysis, and troubleshooting that's faced with an unexpected dilemma.
More than 100,000 unique visitors a month--a large percentage of them, ne'er-do-well hackers--are downloading WildPackets' free drivers for reasons other than their intended purpose, capturing wireless network traffic for monitoring and analyzing network and application performance.
These drivers are often being used in conjunction with AirCrack, an open-source program that cracks WEP passwords, typically for the purpose of accessing password-protected wireless networks.
The people at WildPackets are trying to be good Web citizens--their license agreement and the Web page state that the drivers are only downloadable for use with licensed WildPackets' products--but the downloads persist. So the company is trying to put this high volume of traffic to good use by turning hackers into helpers.
Prominently displayed at the top of the driver page is a banner that reads "105,000 people access drivers here from WildPackets monthly, $1 from you could help find a cure for Parkinson's - please donate today" linking directly to the donation page of the Parkinson's Institute and Clinical Center in the Silicon Valley.
Turns out some hackers have compassion, or at least are curious enough to check it out further. In less than one week, more than 1,000 people have clicked on the banner. WildPackets doesn't yet know how many clicks have yielded donations, but it's reached out to the charity for details to spread this story to a larger audience.
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Many are concerned about cell phone networks getting overwhelmed on Tuesday during the U.S. presidential inauguration.
Cell phone networks are built to be oversubscribed, using statistical analysis to bet against a certain of users flooding a network all at the same time. While it's never been a fool-proof strategy, it's worked reasonably well until recently when smartphones and bandwidth-intensive applications have moved to mobile devices.
But cell networks aren't the only networks starting to get overwhelmed. Cisco Systems says that in 2012, Internet video traffic alone will be 400 times the traffic carried by the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000. Video-on-demand, IPTV, peer-to-peer video, and Internet video are forecast to account for nearly 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic in 2012.
"Cisco VNI projections indicate that IP traffic will increase at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46 percent from 2007 to 2012, nearly doubling every two years. This will result in an annual bandwidth demand on the world's IP networks of approximately 522 exabytes2, or more than half a zettabyte."
With this and the continued growth of converged networks within enterprise environments, the thought of the simple data network is no more. Networks have become highly complex and distributed, tasking companies with the need to scale to monitor and analyze all aspects of the voice, video and IPTV.
The network that has become overwhelmed in 2008 will become incredibly burdened in 2009 and beyond if companies do not manage their bandwidth.
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