Introduction to 802.11ac
Jan 11th, 2012
We get a lot of questions about this new upcoming Wi-Fi standard and I thought it would be a good idea to talk to our in-house expert at Aruba on the topic. Here is a video of that conversation with Peter Thornycroft, aka. pthornycroft, a member of Aruba Networks Office of the CTO.
As you might already know, we have published the first version of our 802.11ac FAQ at Airheads Social knowledge base.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx1wwySalFA[/youtube]
To summarize, here are the top-3 things you need to be aware of when it comes to 802.11ac.
1. 802.11ac means more speed
802.11n supports up to 40MHz channel bonding and up to 4 spatial streams. 802.11ac will support up to 160MHz channel bonding and up to 8 spatial streams. Note that this performance increase depends on the capabilities of the Wi-Fi client; due to battery life restrictions, many mobile devices may not support top 802.11ac transmission rates. Possible use of beam forming and multi-user MIMO will further improve the performance and reliability of an 802.11ac enabled WLAN.
2. 802.11ac is 5GHz only
Wi-Fi clients will need to operate in 5GHz frequency band, need to be enabled with 802.11ac capable Wi-Fi chipsets and need to communicate with a 802.11ac capable AP in order to take advantage of the increased speeds. As Peter mentioned, we expect newer generation of dual-radio enterprise WLAN access points (AP) to be 802.11b/g/n capable on the 2.4GHz frequency band and 802.11a/n/ac capable on the 5GHz frequency band.
3. 802.11ac will require new client/AP hardware
802.11ac technology cannot be implemented on existing 802.11n based Wi-Fi chipsets, and hence it will require new Wi-Fi client and AP hardware. In addition, greater number of antennas are required to support greater number of spatial streams allowed with 802.11ac. As you might remember, number of antennas on a Wi-Fi client or an AP needs to be greater or equal to the number of spatial streams that it supports.
Hope this answers some of your questions on 802.11ac – let us know of any additional questions, comments.
Talk you next time, thanks for tuning in!
