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Networking: Wi-Fi Speeds to go into Acceleration as 802.11ac Standard Rolls Out
IEEE 802.11ac is a wireless networking standard which is positioned to succeed the 802.11n standard used by today’s home and office wireless routers over the last five years. The new standard has been under development since 2011 and was officially approved in January 2014. The advantages are that it offers greater bandwidth and better range over Wi-Fi. Think streaming of high definition TV quality. And users more satisfied with the speed with which they can interact with cloud and big-data apps.
When clients and routers are both using 802.11ac, networking speeds of up to 500-Megabits per second (Mbps) are likely and speeds of up to several gigabytes per second are possible. It can broadcast up to eight different devices simultaneously. The 802.11ac also standardizes a technique called beamforming which allows a device to transmit radio signals directed specifically towards another devices. The advantages are faster throughput and lower power consumption. It’s cool, but unless you have a very recent Smartphone or laptop, you may not yet have a client that can use it.
David Galassi, director of IT at Yale, said that “we’ve seen very impressive performance results with our 802.11ac clients, but we were really surprised to see performance improvements with older 802.11n clients as well.”
A report by WildPackets looked at how quickly the new 802.11ac standard is being adopted. One problem is device support. Of companies surveyed, respondents said that less than 10 percent of their existing client devices supported the new standard, and only 4 percent of respondent companies had switched over more than half of their clients to use the technology. The industries where there have been the highest rate of adoption of 802.11ac are healthcare, high tech and telecommunications.
But while uptake has been slow so far in 2014, uptake is expected to jump significantly in 2015. Wildpackets expects that by the end of 2015 more than half of companies will have deployed 802.11ac.
