Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Analyst Angle. We’ve collected a group of the industry’s leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry.
In the good old days, the IEEE or a similar standards body would go through the long, intentionally-arduous process of developing a new standard. Then a subset of that standard would be certified by a trade association, like the Wi-Fi Alliance, for purposes of interoperability, as the IEEE doesn’t specify compliance or interoperability testing as part of a standard. Then vendors would produce products based on the interoperability specification, and customers, armed with the warm, fuzzy feeling that standards and interoperability certifications bring, and benefitting from the lower prices and improved performance that are the usual perks of a competitive market at all layers of the food chain, would consequently profit from productivity gains inherent in a technology sufficiently advanced to merit the process just described.
Today, however, the hyper-competitive nature of the market for wireless local area networks has flipped that sequence of events on its head. We’ve already seen announcements this year of (claimed) 802.11ac-compliant chipsets and even a few end-user products from leading vendors, this despite the fact that there is not yet a standard in existence to claim compliance with. OK, there are drafts, but the Wi-Fi Alliance is at least a year, I believe, from issuing its initial interoperability specification and likely two years will elapse before this work is completely finished. Why, then, is there such a rush to get 802.11ac products into the market?
Well, apart from the aforementioned hyper-competitive environment, 802.11ac products will be backwards-compatible with 802.11n, at least in the 5 GHz bands. And even early products are likely to embody advances in radio technology that will yield at least modest performance improvements (as measured by rate-versus-range throughput, overall capacity, improvements in support for a varying traffic mix and increasing numbers of users and devices, etc.) when interoperating with existing 802.11n infrastructure in that backwards-compatible mode. We might call this “better n than n” performance, just as we see a “better g than g” boost in 802.11g links when one end of a link is a .11n radio. And, in addition, it’s important to point out that the Wi-Fi Alliance really can’t do its job without some hardware being available, and the early chipsets, fully compliant with the eventual standard or not, can only help. And, by the way, we do believe that any incompatibilities between today’s chipsets and the products that integrate them and the final standard should be easily remedied by firmware and/or software upgrades, as was the case with .11g and .11n – the standard is that far along.
And it’s hard to argue with the benefits that 802.11ac will bring. Single-stream performance as high as 433 megabits per second has been claimed, along with a whopping 1.3 gigabits per second (yes, faster than gigabit Ethernet) using three-stream MIMO. But note both of these performance levels require an 80 megahertz radio channel, and there may be issues with both regulatory approval in various parts of the world and with finding a consistently-available swath of spectrum that large. No matter – again, backwards compatibility along with flexibility in the standard itself will save the day, and we can expect significantly-higher levels of throughput and capacity than 802.11n regardless. And it’s important to note here that single-stream performance is particularly important for handsets, where the multi-antenna designs required for MIMO implementations simply won’t fit in the tight form factors of today’s products. We believe that offload to Wi-Fi in handsets will become an essential solution to the cellular data capacity challenge, so progress here cannot come soon enough.
While we don’t expect to see enterprise-class wireless LANs incorporating 802.11ac until around the middle of 2013, a good number of client devices, including some integrated into handsets, notebooks, and tablets, should be available in the second half of this year, along with residential- and SMB-class access points/routers. I can’t wait to get my hands on these products and put them through a grueling test or two – but, based on what I’ve seen so far, I think we’ll all be impressed with the advances embodied in the broad range of products that will come to market under the 802.11ac banner. For a technology that can trace its root back to Benjamin Franklin and his legendary kite, and the wizardry of late-19th century geniuses like Hertz, Tesla and Marconi, the level of innovation in wireless today remains stunning. And, no surprise, 802.11ac is only the next step and far from the last exciting development we’ll see in what remains the most important sector of the networking and communications market.
