The emerging gigabit 802.11ac, Wi-Fi standard is the current darling of the hype machine. The standard will be finalized in February 2014. However, that has not stopped manufacturers from shipping 802.11ac routers, access points, and mobile devices. Shortel (SHOR) recently provided their opinion on what this means for your business.
The article points out that more people are using mobile apps and devices. Shortel calculates that a typical worker may have three IP addresses, while digital natives may have up to six IP addresses. These stats suggest that mobility has become a must-have and the author claims that 802.11ac can meet the needs of increasing mobility because 802.11ac is faster, more reliable, and delivers more Wi-Fi capacity. 802.11ac is:
- Faster – 802.11ac is three times faster than 802.11n Wi-Fi. 802.11ac will deliver up to 1.3 Gbps, which is about three times faster than 802.11n. This capacity will be ideal for real-time applications, such as IP voice and streaming video. Faster data throughput means better battery life for mobile devices, too.
- More reliable – 802.11ac is more reliable with less interference. 802.11ac operates at 5 GHz, which is far less crowded than the 2.4 GHz band that by 802.11b/g/n access points — as well as cordless phones, automatic garage door openers, and other home appliances. That means that there’s less interference from other Wi-Fi-enabled devices, which will result in a better user experience.
- Improved throughput. 802.11ac uses multiple antennas for transmitting and receiving RF signals, and that means better data throughput. More specifically, MIMO, or Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output, is key to providing wireless performance that is more switch-like, compared to the shared media nature of 802.11n.
Shortel believes that Gigabit Wi-Fi can be a real asset for unified communications, streaming media, and other bandwidth-hungry apps. They plan to use the greater capacity of 802.11ac to support more devices and more apps. In the workplace, teams want to engage and share without hassle using modern collaboration tools with the devices of their choice creating the need for BYOD.
The newest generation of workers are digital natives, who are more inclined to use videoconferencing for quick chats or to share ideas. In addition, many people use tablets to stream media, and more organizations are turning to streaming media over Wi-Fi for digital signage, training, company meetings, and customer support. And those bandwidth-hungry applications will love the new gigabit Wi-Fi.
Shoretel reassures those that have deployed an 802.11n WLAN recently, you don’t need to be in a hurry to move to 802.11ac. You can be confident in the investment that you made, as the first-generation 802.11ac will offer only incremental benefits over 802.11n. But if you are replacing old Wi-Fi or expanding your wireless LAN or looking to downsize your wired network in favor of wireless, you should weigh the options between 802.11n and the new 802.11ac.
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802.11ac will only get faster, the theoretical max speed of 802.11ac is just shy of 7Gbps, which you will never see in the wild, but don’t be surprised to see link speeds of 2Gbps or more in the next few years. At 2Gbps, you’ll get a transfer rate of 256MB/sec.
To reach such Wi-Fi speeds, chipset and device makers will have to figure out how to make second-generation chipsets with four or more 802.11ac streams in software and hardware. The engineers at Broadcom (BRCM), Qualcomm (QCOM), Marvell (MRVL), and Intel (INTC) are already working on ways to implementing four and eight-stream 802.11ac solutions. A lot of work will need to be done by the chipset and device makers to make sure that advanced features, such as beamforming, comply with the standard and are interoperable with other 802.11ac devices.
In general, then, you can certainly expect some impressive speeds from 802.11ac in situations where you don’t need the performance and reliability of wired GigE. But I do not believe that 802.11ac will replace a wired Gigabit Ethernet network just yet.
What do you think?
Related article
- Cisco Unveils Cloud-Based 802.11ac Access Point (eweek.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.