With the gigantic growth in wireless technology-
everything is going wireless nowadays. This rapid evolution is followed by
research which arose in diverse protocols and standards. Recently, PC World
reported a new standard named 802.11ac, which will fit into Wi-Fi stack as an efficient
standard to take wireless speeds to the next level. This standard is being proposed
by eminent companies - Broadcom and Qualcomm Atheros. The report adds that by
the end of this year or early 2013, this standard will swap the current 802.11n
standard as the succeeding step in prevailing wireless networking.
This standard will strictly use the
5GHz frequency band for its operations. The 2.4GHz band however offers better
range but there is a crowd of devices like microwaves and Bluetooth headsets already
on that frequency which can cause interference and related issues. But,
802.11ac is coming up with a new concept of mandatory beam-forming technology which
will enable transmitters and receivers to develop an awareness of each other so
that beams can be concentrated directly towards each device. All this is being
done to cope up with the shorter range of the 5GHz band.
In the standard, the 5GHz band will
provide more available channels – each 80MHz wide compared to the 40MHz channels
in 802.11n, which will increase the data rate by multiplying the amount of data
per carrier signal by a factor of 4 through an improved modulation scheme. This
consequently will theoretically increase the maximum bandwidth to 433Mbps per
spatial stream in comparison to 802.11n’s 150Mbps. The standard will also rise
the number of possible concurrent spatial streams from 3 to 8.
Theoretically, a bandwidth of nearly
866Mbps will be achievable by the new entrant devices since they’ll be limited
to only 2-3 antennas. But practically they’ll perform much faster than today’s
standards. The exact specifications will tell us more about the performance but
for that we’ve to wait a few months!
802.11ac capable routers and devices
will be expected to be available in early 2013.
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