Who's Ready for 5G WIFI?

[Ketchup]

I know I am!

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...ng-on-ethernet-standard-for-faster-wi-fi.html

One of the groups involved, the MGBase-T Alliance, officially announced its membership on Monday. Members include Avaya, Aruba Networks and Brocade Communications, as well as component vendors Broadcom and Freescale Semiconductor. The MGBase-T Alliance was formed in June.

The other big player is the NBase-T Alliance, formed in late October by Cisco Systems, Xilinx, Freescale and Aquantia, a company that's already making 2.5G/5G components.

Enterprises will probably be able to buy 2.5G/5G equipment starting in the second quarter of next year, Dell'Oro Group analyst Alan Weckel said. Considering that the task group to hash out the standard hasn't even met yet, there's a good chance those products will be based on pre-standard technology.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Is this Samsung's 60Ghz wifi tech?

 

[Railgun]

Right now it's .11ac.

Maybe a better name than the ambiguous 5G is warranted.

 

[Ketchup]

Right now it's .11ac.

Maybe a better name than the ambiguous 5G is warranted.

Agreed. Possibly standardization will bring us that.

 

[azazel1024]

No, this is 2.5/5Gbps ETHERNET. This is not 5G wireless technology.

As the article points out, this is for an inbetweener standard from 1000base-tx and 10gigabase-tx, as the later only supports cable lengths of 45m or 55m on cat5 and cat6.

That said, since few people in a home, or even in a number of businesses have runs longer than that...the "need to upgrade cables" is kind of specious.

Now, I would not mind something faster, and frankly 5Gbps, or even 2.5Gbps would be a nice upgrade, but based on a lot of the stuff in the article I really doubt we'll see it next year unless they rubber stamp something pre-existing that is non-standards compliant.

Of course seeing actually seeing wide spread support in hardware is another thing. 3-5 years sounds more likely there...oh wait, 10GbE wide spread deployment (really truely) is probably only that far out. But, hey, I'd love to be proved wrong, 2.5Gbps or better 5Gbps, being the new standard "common" interface speed would be real nifty. If it works on 5e up to 100m I wouldn't mind, but meh. No need there, 45m is overkill for my use.