3 ms·
"...with the downside of using frequencies that are easily blocked by walls. Even thin cubicle walls may block signals, Wilocity acknowledged. "
by hayksaakian 14y ago
"...with the downside of using frequencies that are easily blocked by walls. Even thin cubicle walls may block signals, Wilocity acknowledged. "
- femto 14y agoThat's an asset for a lot of indoor applications, as it allows an independent cell in each room, meaning minimal loss of data capacity due to interference between cells in the same band. You need an access point for each room, but that's okay once the hardware is cheap. For new installations, one can wire a building for data, analogous to wiring for lighting, with access points in place of luminaries. Eventually we will see light fittings with inbuilt 60GHz access points? The usage scenario for 60GHz is similar to infrared. The main advantage of 60GHz being that it able to penetrate a wider range of materials, thus offering better coverage. It will be interesting to see what the patent landscape is for this. I'm hopeful that it will be largely unencumbered, so will become mainstream quickly. The basic system was defined 15-20 years ago, as OFDM based WLAN was always intended to operate in the 60GHz bands [1]. For the last 15-20 years its been a case of waiting for (cheap) radio technology to catch up with, and enable, the original WLAN vision. [1] http://www.sss-mag.com/pdf/97_mmlan.pdf http://www.sss-mag.com/pdf/97_mmlan.pdf
- dnu 14y agoNot good for a house, but very useful for apartments in large buildings. You can have one wireless AP in each room (connected to eachother with wires), and almost no interference from the neighbours.
- hayksaakian 14y agoIs there no developing, competing standard that improves on current WiFi without these drawbacks?
- kbuck 14y ago802.11n on the 5GHz band (most implementations use 2.4GHz) already does this. The real problem is the 2.4GHz band, which is simply over-saturated. 2.4GHz also penetrates walls really well, which is a drawback in apartment situations because it introduces more interference from neighboring access points (and many other devices operating on or near the 2.4GHz frequency - wireless phones, microwaves, etc.). I've used a 5GHz 802.11n AP in my last two apartments; it's worked great every time. Most of the time I don't even see any other access points in range. Even if there are other APs, 5GHz has many more frequency bands available, so avoiding interference is simple. The only drawback is that so many devices don't support 5GHz. My smartphone didn't until I upgraded to the SGS III, and my Nook still doesn't. Also, 5GHz is faster because the spec allows 40MHz channels.
- hayksaakian 14y agoSo would pushing for 5ghz N be better than 60ghz?
- joenathan 14y agoAC is 5GHz @ 1Gbs and it is already available. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac http://www.amazon.com/RT-AC66U-Dual-Band-Wireless-AC1750-Gigabit-Router/dp/B008ABOJKS/ http://www.amazon.com/RT-AC66U-Dual-Band-Wireless-AC1750-Gig...
- dnu 14y agoYes, but it can also use several channels. This plus the AC standard becoming more popular will lead to overcrowding in 5 GHz also. 2.4 GHz has 3 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels. 5 GHz has about 23 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels. Both go through walls, so you will get interference from neighbouring apartments no matter what technology you implement. The only solutions are to use a much higher frequency, or shield your apartment walls.
- JulianMontez 14y agoThat quote is referring to the theoretical 7Gbps speed, not it's standard one.
- CognitiveLens 14y agoIt's actually the radio frequency itself that doesn't penetrate walls - it's not a bandwidth restriction, so it has nothing to do with theoretical throughput.