802.11ac Standard

Some things are making news in the wireless world, the IEEE wants another wireless standard in the mix called the  802.11ac, now the fastest standard they have is the 802.11n(speeds up to 300 Mbps), which was recently published in October of 2009. What is so great about the 802.11ac development? Well one thing is the speed, it is estimated that it will be able to carry up to 1 gigabit per second! The IEEE has been working on 802.11ac in 2009 and wants to put up a draft on it soon (this year). Products are not yet ready but could be around 2012. It is estimated that a billion 802.11ac devices could be expected in 2015. The standard will be using the existing radio spectrum in ranges below 6GHz and reports say it will have backwards compatibility for older devices. Frank Dickson said, “The goal of 802.11ac is to provide data speeds faster than 802.11n, with speeds of around 1Gbps," he continued and said, “The timing for 802.11ac approval is to have a draft standard created by 2011 and have the first 802.11ac products out by the end of 2012." So what does this mean to the average person? Well for the home user they probably would not see a difference if they were browsing online since ISP connection speeds are usually slower than LAN (Local Area Network) speeds. If the average person was streaming videos from another computer within his home or transferring large files they would see a difference. This would be more towards businesses that don’t want to run cables to each computer, and would be more geared to mobile devices like tablets, phones, laptops etc. Not much information is available as the 802.11ac is still under development. Which makes room for changing, but if you want to check out more information you can head over to the IEEE site at http://www.ieee.org