Is 802.11n Worth It?

I like it. More bandwidth. I want more bandwidth.

Having worked with Engineers and been a salesman in a former life as well as been a guinea pig working with cutting edge technolgies (gigabit fiber optics/ethernet,etc...) including 802.11. I have to say that big promises are being made that in my view are not likely to happen soon enough. The fastest 802.11 I have worked with only has 54 MBPS bandwidth and only about 20 MBPS usefull after all the security overhead.

Regardless of how much bandwidth they eventually milk from maturing 802.11 they still have problems with security and interference + attenuation losses which they can never get around. A WIRED environment is infinitely more secure and much much faster. There are far too many failed examples of 802.11 projects to not heed my warnings. The most embarrassing being the Royal Ottawa Mental Health centre who were stupid enough to go 100% wireless. It has and continues to be a living nightmare for all Involved and they are lucky it has not resulted in employee or patient life threatening Incidents as a result of the poor availability,interference and overall operation. See archived articles in the Ottawa Citizen dated Sunday Feb 24, 2008 and Monday Feb 25/08 ( Front pages ) entitled a "Royal Mess" for proof.They took the bait Nortel fed them, hook , line & sinker with wireless PC's and VOIP digital phones that lose connections/clip and are useless in an emergency If the wireless or PC environment goes down.

This is the first privately owned , run for profit, public hospital experiment in Ontario. called a P3 model that ultimatly costs the Ontario tax payers more $$$ than If the Provincial Govt owned and operated it (consortium is billing the Ont Govt $800K/mth).

The article only touchs the tip of the iceberg when it coms to all the problems with this P3 model "nightmare" and we are still paying for all the false promises that Nortel Networks made when they sold the wireless Idea to the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre .

As a result of all the problems with wireless, they have been forced to slowly hard wire the building to establish faster more reliable service. About 5% of the building has been hard wired and likely 80% will have to be done . Unfortunately the building was designed with wireless in mind which means that no provisions were made to have conduits, cable troughs etc for a wired environment. This means reverse enginering a building for a hard wired environment that will cost at least twice as much than If they hard wired it during design and construction phase. Meanwhile the taxpayers of Ontario have to foot the bill for this major mistake. This is a perfect example of why you shouldn't go wireless or Invest in Nortel Networks for that matter. The recent sale of Nortel's wireless division to Alcatel and another round of massive layoffs for Nortel employees is Karma coming back to bite them in the assets.

Bandwidth....need more bandwidth....and RAM....need more RAM for HD stuff.... and more core processors....need more multicore processors.......

For everyday browsing, no. If you need to transfer or stream large files all the time, yes.

Stream TV to my PSP on g is acceptable. Moving movies to AppleTV is slow.

Good progress, but migrating to 5.8Ghz from 2.4Ghz has not and will not remove the problem of interference as long as the spectrum is unlicensed.

My issue with these improvements is that the declared bandwidths are always assumptions. And the quality of operation is always presented as good for all weather conditions regardless of the time won weather effect on microwave signals.

That is why i'm in total agreement with Laserlover's comments.

Increase in bandwidth is desired and most welcome, at least to help network designers and operators accommodate the "critical" bandwidth consumers among their users and also make things easier for video streaming.

Cheers,

ethobil

Technology is nice, after all, myself I work in a technology company doing ADSL and stuff. Nevertheless, there is an issue about the impact of high frequencies to human health. Given that higher frequencies means more antennas to cover a given space (due to less reflectivity) I wonder if we are going to get our brains "cooked". (I wonder, is there a provision to adapt the antenna transmit power?) On the other hand, the penetrability of higher frequencies is lower, so it may be better after all.

I wonder if there are any studies about all these.

If you do a search on Google you are likely to find at least one article that points towards brain cancer when it come to cell phones. Considering the microwave frequencies used 2.4 GHZ (same as the microwave oven you nuke your food at home) and higher , it's no wonder.

By the same token, you will probably find studies that say these high frequency devices are perfectly safe. I don't believe everything I read or hear and don't care to be a guinea pig. Do you ?