Wireless N?

[fixxxer0]

Its a draft spec from what ive read, is it worth it to buy now or should I wait till some formats finalized?


I'm setting up my wireless in my house because I'm getting rid of one of my cable modems.

I don't want to lose any speed and I have some thick walls to go through.



If so, which company and gear to go with? It will be for PC's for now, but notebooks soon...

 

[spyordie007]

Unless you "absolutly must have N speeds" I would stick with G for now; it's not exactly like consumer-grade APs are expensive and it's too soon for AP manufacturer's to guarantee that their devices will support the standard once it is ratified (hardware requirements may still change).

Also keep in mind that poor signal quality is going to give you poor speeds regardless of whether your run G or N.

 

[fixxxer0]

Well, N supposedly has more range and throughput due to the MIMO, but yea I think I'll just go with a G network it should be fine...

 

[spyordie007]

MIMO will definitely give greater throughput because you'll have multiple radios transmitting and receiving simultaneously. AFAIK the range improvements are accomplished by exploiting the spatial diversity of the multiple transmitters/receivers; it will probably help a little, but I'm skeptical as to how much it will improve real-world range.

The transmitter power is the same and it's still OFDM, and it's not like your antennas are going to be that far apart in your mobile device (laptop, etc.)

My guess would be that in practice if you're going for range it will still be just as important to get good hardware on both ends with proper antenna placement. This is just my guess though so I could be wrong. Most of the gear I work with is Cisco (and some Proxim) so I probably wont be using 802.11n in production until after it?s been ratified.

Erik

 

[nweaver]

I have done real world testing, and I was pretty skeptical at first. N provides more range, and better throughput at all ranges. I was going through a metal wall (partition) @ 65 feet, and was able to stream a 10 Mb/s HD stream without problems. G couldn't get the stream off the ground at 15 feet (our baseline).

It really depends, because I don't like to buy prestandard stuff, but I'll tell you, that Dell laptop (with miniPCI express Broadcom Draftn card) and the router (Netgear) really made me think twice...

I can't give full details of the report (might poke around dell and see if they have published it) but before you question the tests, please realize I"m a pro QA engineer, and a wireless guy, so I know my methodology and stuff...I wouldn't let them do some things they wanted (like an underground, empty parking garage for "real world" type testing) and it's a valid, repeateable result imho.

as an example, samba was nearly 3X the speed at 15' range over G.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: fixxxer0
Its a draft spec from what ive read, is it worth it to buy now or should I wait till some formats finalized?

The current situation has problems, with interference and interoperability being among the bigger ones. Most vendors want you to believe that everything's just fine, test reports aren't agreeing with that. It really should be better, and if it doesn't get better, we'll all either end up blasting each other out of the air, or maybe just not using much wireless.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/06/14/draft_11n_revealed_part2/

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: Madwand1

Originally posted by: fixxxer0
Its a draft spec from what ive read, is it worth it to buy now or should I wait till some formats finalized?

The current situation has problems, with interference and interoperability being among the bigger ones. Most vendors want you to believe that everything's just fine, test reports aren't agreeing with that. It really should be better, and if it doesn't get better, we'll all either end up blasting each other out of the air, or maybe just not using much wireless.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/06/14/draft_11n_revealed_part2/

This is a good article thanks for the link; I also like part one of the series:
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/06/01/draft_11n_revealed_part1/

 

[JackMDS]

Since the MIMO devices, were rushed out to cash on consumer impatience there is only Basic Routers, and Client Cards. Take into consideration that the whole gamut of other Wireless Devices that are needed for flexible configurations are not currently available in MIMO, and the future device would not be compatible with the current one.

:sun: