Monthly Archives: May 2015

Wi-Fi evolving

Wi-Fi technology is evolving and improving capacity limits. New standards become available even in hardware, so the new momentums are coming for the enterprises. Using of a lot of wireless and mobile devices in the working areas increases the demand for Wi-Fi capacity for the enterprises.

There is an enhancement of the Wi-FI 802.11n standard with newer W-Fi 802.11ac standard (Wave 1 and Wave 2 products). Wave 1 products support 20MHz, 40MHz and 80 MHz channels in the 5 GHz free Wi-FI band and also for backward compatibility with 802.11n there is an option using 2.4GHz band.

There is more channel bonding (in Wi-FI 802.11n standard was 40 MHz) and now is even 80 MHz or 160 MHz, which gives the speed of 433Mbps, 867 Mbps or 1300 Mbps at the physical layer. Wave 2 products speed is going to the 3,47 Gbps.

Already on the market, there are 802.11ac Wi-Fi-enabled laptops from Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. Also, there are 802.11ac Wi-FI routers from Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, etc.

There are more MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) – Wi-FI 802.11n standard uses 4 spatial streams and Wi-Fi 802.11ac standard goes with 8 spatial streams. Wave 2 products will come with new technology Multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO), which gives the possibility for sending multiple frames for multiple clients at the same time on the same frequency spectrum.

Wave 1 products can support 256QAM in an environment with low interference, which gives the possibility to use HD streaming between devices in the same room.

Wave 2 products are planned to be backwards compatible with Wave 1 802.11ac Wi-Fi devices. This evolution arises from the planned needs of the homes in the near future where there will be a need for connecting around 20 Wi-Fi devices in the home.