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MIMO 4x4 with TxBF Has Arrived - Dang That Was Fast! PDF Print
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Written by Devin Akin   
Monday, 20 October 2008
http://www.quantenna.com/products-overview.html
 
Yep, my good friend Dilip Advani (CWNE #43) pointed this out to me recently.  Can you believe it?  Before long, we'll have data rates hitting 600 Mbps, with throughputs that will still be under 100 Mbps. :)  We'll have Beamforming, which will change how we wrestle with co-channel interference.  Beamforming will give us higher throughput at range and will stabilize our RF environment significantly.  This is GREAT news indeed!

My advice to IT Managers: When you see this stuff hit the market with a Wi-Fi Alliance sticker on it, find any excuse possible to throw 802.11a/b/g gear out the window (or sell it on eBay).  Obviously these new 802.11n chipsets will support 802.11r/k when the Wi-Fi Alliance version is released as "Voice-Enterprise", and likely whatever new standards are released for the next 3-4 years as well.  

How fast will vendors adopt these new chipsets?  Unknown.  You know, it's alot like 802.11r/k in fact - it'll all depend on the Wi-Fi Alliance's willingness to build and implement a test plan.  A year?  Two?  The standard is already in place, but that seems to matter very little, which is a bit irritating (though I certainly understand why things are the way they are).  I, like most everyone else, want everything now. ;) 
Comments (4)Add Comment
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written by GTHill, October 15, 2008
Since this is a hardware change, what does everyone on this board suggest we do when dealing with our customers that are looking at buying hardware now? Recommend waiting for the NexGen11n (I just coined that term by the way)? :)

If it is two years out, I may be able to justify 11a/g for now, since 11a rocks anyway. Thoughts?

GT

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written by Devin Akin, October 15, 2008
My $0.05 (you know I always give more than 2 cents) is that everyone should be going to 1st gen .11n as fast as they can within the confines of their business models and tossing 802.11a/b/g out as fast as possible...but of course that's not always reasonable or feasible. I doubt it's 2 years, but it reasonably may be 12 months or so before we see the Wi-Fi Alliance approve 4x4 TxBF capable devices.
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written by Slipshod, October 15, 2008
The big-name Enterprise AP vendors are all very tightly tied to their chosen radio chipsets. If they decided to jump ship to a different radio chip you should expect a significant delay for enterprise products since they'd have to do some level of rewrite on a lot of the software features to make them work with a new chipset.

I'd expect to see the quantenna product showing up in consumer gear initially (much faster business cycle, less radio-specific software), and this will in turn put more pressure on Atheros/Marvell to get their act together. After they release new chips you'll see enterprise AP products start coming out... I doubt we'll be seeing 4x4 (4 stream) enterprise products in 1-2 years.

As far as near-term buying decisions go, I'd say go for "cheap" 11n and toss the legacy stuff as quick as you can. And nobody should be buying legacy clients at this point.
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written by S Jackman, October 16, 2008
My recommendation is to move to 802.11n-draft2.0 if:
- you are going to deploy or currently have client devices that can take advantage of it,
- have a business need for the added speeds,
- cost is not an issue,
- need to have a more stable connection,
- and will actually survey your environment using 802.11n APs.

If you have no 802.11n client devices that will fully take advantage of it, you will get some benefit in a more stable connection due to the new radio architecture at the AP-level.

You will pay for it now. Most current-market AP designs are 2x3 now. Devin and Dilip are talking about 4x4 designs, which as you said require a hardware forklift.

BTW, if you are using a split-MAC architecture consider the fact that you're throwing your controllers away (or as Devin says to eBay it) to gain the needed DS speed increases from the added 802.11 workload.

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