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802.11ah Wi-Fi Standard Approved
- revelation 11y agoWhere is it? Can I read it? All I'm seeing is a press release linking to other articles that are mere low-effort copies of the same press release. Also, previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10838973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10838973
- sengork 11y agoCheers, I didn't find that one when I searched.
- carlisle_ 11y agoAt 900Mhz I imagine there will be lots of interference problems, or is there something I'm missing?
- structAnkit 11y agoI don't believe we really use cordless phones in the 900MHz anymore and I believe the consortiums determine which spectrums are sufficiently unused before targeting them. Verizon and T-Mobile have some LTE spectrum in the 700MHz range for building penetration and range so I expect to see great things at the 900MHz range for lower power devices.
- revelation 11y agoThey say 900MHz but that's really just a rough ballpark, presumably it will use the 915MHz ISM band in America and 868MHz in Europe.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoIt's not just cordless phones though. Our baby monitor says it uses 900MHz. I don't know how many types of devices use 900MHz but it seems crowded to me.
- tegansnyder 11y agoRent a spectrum analyzer. Travel to every city. Plot the data. Then you will know.
- drmpeg 11y agoHere in Silicon Valley, it's used by smart meters. All the short duration blips in the waterfall are gas and electricity meters. http://www.w6rz.net/gqrx915.png http://www.w6rz.net/gqrx915.png
- 0x0 11y ago"Twice the range".. Is that a doubling of the radius or a doubling of the diameter (edit: oops, I meant area) of a ~ circle surrounding the access point? Am I being spoiled thinking either of those options aren't super impressive for a whole new standard? Where's the 10x (order of magnitude) improvement? Will it take 3-5 further complete iterations of incompatible standards? :)
- JoshTriplett 11y ago> Is that a doubling of the radius or a doubling of the diameter Those are equivalent: d=2r, so 2d=2(2r) I very much doubt it means a doubling in the area or volume of the coverage region; seems far more likely that it means a doubling of distance. But while this might only give twice the range with clear line of sight, lower frequencies tend to permeate obstructions better.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 11y agoAs usual with Wi-Fi you won't get close to theoretical range and distance in practice. 802.11ah includes support for relay access points [1]. Most probably it is a requirement for "nearly doubled range". > Am I being spoiled thinking either of those options aren't super impressive for a whole new standard? Where's the 10x (order of magnitude) improvement? 802.11ah is not the "mainline" standard. 10x improvement is left for 802.11ax. 802.11ah is for IoT applications: low bandwidth, low power consumption, high distance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah#Relay_Access_Point_.28AP.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah#Relay_Access_Poi...
- Havoc 11y agoCool. I'd rather see a standard capable of carrying gigabit traffic. Sure there is ac, but after noise & overheads it comes nowhere close. So you've got people like me that can both get and afford gigabit but opt for 100mbps because the wireless tech isn't keeping up.
- revelation 11y agoThat's what 802.11ad is for, which can transmit over 60GHz (which limits it to basically one room, as it's quite readily attenuated by even air). That said, at 60GHz of course bandwidth is awesome. TP-Link has a router: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/5/10721550/tp-link-talon-ad7200-router-ces-2016 http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/5/10721550/tp-link-talon-ad72...
- sengork 11y agoAlso to note is that a potential hacker doesn't need to be within the visible range of the home WiFi network with the increase in coverage.
- hueving 11y agoThat's already the case with directional antennas.
- ridgeguy 11y agoWhen can I buy wireless headphones based on this standard? I hate the short range of 2.54 and 5 GHz headphones.
- revelation 11y agoHopefully nowhere and never. These are bands unsuitable for high bandwidth applications and we certainly don't need more of the public spectrum polluted by things like cheap chinese RF headphones.
- hughes 11y agoAre there wifi-based headphones for any standard? Seems like a terribly complicated approach.
- geofft 11y agoThe 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz audio protocols seem to not be wifi-based. (Which makes sense, you don't want them to be IP-based.) They just transmit uncompressed analog audio over probably something like FM. 900 MHz headphones seem to be readily available, and to have been readily available for years.
- SquareWheel 11y agoReally? Does this mean a radio tuned to the right channel would be able to play the audio stream?
- dogma1138 11y agoNo they don't use simple radio, all of them will use a packet based protocol either proprietary or some sort of a standard digital (audio) streaming protocol. Encoding and packets don't add up any substantial latency just look Bluetooth A2DP headsets and AirPlay speakers (which uses Wifi as a carrier) headsets. If your headsets did use just normal 2.4ghz radio like say a basic walkie talkie the downside is that you would've been able to hear any other transmission on that band e.g. an old baby monitor(new ones are digital too).
- 11y ago
- cjensen 11y agoSummary: 802.11ah: Better range, lower bandwidth 802.11ad: Better bandwidth. Doesn't go through walls. 802.11ax: Successor to 11ac expected in 2019
- ksec 11y agoThere is 802.11ay expected in 2019 as well, a step up from 802.11ad using the same 60Ghz. Up to 20Gbps, 3x the rate of 802.11ad. I really really want 802.11 ay and ax to come faster, it will truely bring us to the world of Wireless with the speed we expect from 1Gbps. Wireless Display to TV no longer be slow of choppy with quality degradation.
- melted 11y ago60GHz basically means "same room only". Won't go through walls for sure. Should be useful for open space offices though.
- amenghra 11y agoThis can be an advantage depending on the use-case. E.g. an access point in each home or room means the signals aren't interfering with each other.
- melted 11y agoSomeone is going to make a killing on tiny, inexpensive RJ45 60GHz access points and switches that support PoE. Killer use case: stick it into a wall, and everything in the room gets gigabit speeds. No wall warts to deal with.
- will_hughes 11y agoUbiquiti already have something like this, although only 2.4Ghz b/g/n - https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-wall/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-wall/ About AUD$100/unit.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoI wonder if its too late though, perhaps the licensing is easier than Zigbee?
- leaveyou 11y agoI recently bought an 802.11ac wifi adapter promising a nice theoretical 600Mbs in the 5Ghz band and all I was able to get from it was a practical 65-70Mbs (at 2 meters from an 802.11ac router) using the best drivers under Windows. Under Linux the (5Ghz)AC mode didn't work (buggy driver; no vendor support) so I was back in 802.11n mode. Quite underwhelming after spending 200 euros on router and adapter. I will definitely not "early adopt" wifi 802.11ah whenever it appears..
- ghshephard 11y agoIf you get a reasonably good combination of hardware/drivers, 802.11ac works well. I'm able to get 407.99 Mb/s Down, 462.39 Mb/s Up on a 2012 Macbook Air + RT-AC87U WiFi Hotspot on 5 Ghz to speedtest.net in Singapore.
- pmjordan 11y agoI can confirm similar local measurements with MacBook Pros and a D-Link DAP-2950 across a room with a wood partition blocking line of sight. If the AP is advertised as 600Mbit/s, chances are it only supports 1 or 2 streams (MIMO antennas) per band. Most laptops only have 2, but even so the signal quality will be much better wih a 3- or 4- way MIMO setup on the AP end. (The D-Link has 6 antennas, so 3-way MIMO for both 5GHz and 2.4.) In addition to number of antennas, orientation also makes a big difference. Finally, wireless access points seem to be one of those things where quality varies a lot. I hated wifi for its unreliability until I bought a decent (professional/small-to-medium-business grade) AP 8 months ago. Not a single connection problem since, even with the notoriously affected Mac hardware and OSX software versions.
- bcook 11y agoI get ~180Mbit with my Asus RT-N66U (802.11n) with 2x2 clients and the RT-N66U is capable of 3x3. A friend recorded over 700Mbit with his Nexus 9 and an Asus 802.11ac AP. You should be getting muuuch faster speeds. snbforums is a good place for wifi help.
- leaveyou 11y ago
- rgawdzik 11y agoWhere do you keep up to date with the latest carrier/wifi/networking news? (besides HN of course)
- adeptus 11y agonetworkworld.com (click on the 3 bars icon, to the left of the NETWORK WORLD text at the top, to view by category)
- vive-la-liberte 11y agohttp://www.networkworld.com/ http://www.networkworld.com/ clickable link because we're lazy like that
- pdabbadabba 11y agohttp://www.fiercewireless.com/ http://www.fiercewireless.com/
- johnhenry 11y agoMy main issue here is that each new wi-fi standard requires new hardware. I remember reading something within the past few years about revolutionary new wi-fi antennas that will be able to adapt to any frequency such that new hardware wouldn't be an issue. I wonder if anyone has seen anything similar?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jethro_tell 11y agoI think it would have to do far more with the green board and not the antennas. Especially at the home owner router level your not going to put the effort into the back plain of the router. And while most of them aren't really general purpose computers in that, a good part of the functionality is going to be baked into the various chip hardwares on the board. One might be able upgrade the OS but changing the functionality of the radios probably totals the box. Plus, what would they sell you next year? To be sustainable, the company would have to be mostly a software company that people are willing to pay license or upgrade fees for increased functionality or performance. There may be a niche for that, but most people won't upgrade their router or CPE for free. At scale, I doubt that would pan out, especially with increased, upfront hardware cost.
- colejohnson66 11y agoGNU Radio?
- godzillabrennus 11y agoWhat do you expect from advanced radio equipment? Each new hard drive standard has required a faster motherboard to take advantage of it. WiFi standards are backwards compatible in the sense that they work with older hardware to send at the maximum speed that those radios were capable of transmitting.
- johnhenry 11y agoThat's simply not true. Each standard doesn't require a faster motherboard, only some changes to code and possibly a different communication frequency. Changes to code do not require different hardware while changes to the communication frequency do. The crux of my initial comment is that it would be awesome if we could some how get around the last issue and not have to replace hardware in order to use a different frequency, which @walshemj points out is a physical impossibility, but I believe I read an article a while ago in which someone had gotten around this?
- Zenst 11y agoI see this is 900MHz, how will that fair in countries that utilise GSM900 as that may certainly be a restriction in adoption for some countries due to frequency clash, would it not?
- desdiv 11y agoGSM900 is 890-915 MHz; 802.11ah gets around this by using region specific frequencies that sidestep GSM900: 902-928 MHz in the US (26 MHz bandwidth) 863-868 MHz in Europe (5 MHz bandwidth) 916.5-927.5 MHz in Japan (11 MHz bandwidth) Limited bandwidth, especially in Europe, will to lead to both higher power consumption and lower real-world range. >The PHY layer will allow devices and APs to operate over different sub-1GHz ISM bands, depending on the country regulations: 863-868 MHz in Europe, 902-928 MHz in the US, and 916.5-927.5 MHz in Japan. China, South Korea, and Singapore also have specific channels. Reference: http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless-infrastructure/sub-1ghz-wireless-the-low-power-wifi-solution/a/d-id/1315850 http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless-infrastructure/sub-...
- ksec 11y agoI am assuming the new for more bandwidth is only required if you have many information to transferred, which isn't likely the case here for 802.11ah?
- lucaspiller 11y agoIt also means they'll be less channels available, so more noise. These frequencies are commonly used by things like door bells, burglar alarms, garage door openers, car locks, etc. I'm more worried what the effect will be on them.
- jmgrosen 11y agoHow does this compare to 802.15.4? It seems like the two have similar purposes.
- dghughes 11y agoHow will IPv6 affect all these new wireless standards/specs? Going from small to huge frame sizes must have a significant effect on performance.
- legulere 11y agoIPv6 Has nothing to do with frame sizes (except that too large packets now get dropped instead of being fragmented into two parts)
- geofft 11y agoIPv4 lets the MTU get as low as 68 (but you're only sending 8 bytes of data per packet); IPv6 prevents it from getting any lower than 1280, but permits "link-specific fragmentation and reassembly" as long as IPv6 itself doesn't see any smaller fragments. IPv6 also permits (but does not require) jumbograms that make full use of the 32-bit packet size field, but across a wireless link, having to retransmit 4 GB at a time seems like a bad plan... this only seems useful for short-distance wired connections among hosts that know they've got a quality cable between them.
- andreapaiola 11y agoIsn't often better powerline than WiFi through walls?