First Gigabit Wi-Fi Routers Ready to Launch | Hacker News Reader

First Gigabit Wi-Fi Routers Ready to Launch

macrumors.com

55 pointspooriaazimi7 comments

This is great news, but probably not for the reasons you think. Gigabit WiFi doesn't mean you can throw away your gigabit ethernet switches for a couple of reasons:

1) WiFi is shared throughput, which means that all clients must share 1 gbit of throughput; a decent ethernet switch has enough backplane bandwidth to simultaneously serve all ports their full throughput.

2) WiFi latency will still suck, regardless of maximum theoretical throughput, and latency can make a "fast" connection appear dog slow [1] if latency values are high enough.

What's great about this news is that you have more throughput to share amongst your clients. Because your actual throughput is affected by RTT, you'll eventually bump in to a ceiling, but when you start to get in to the 1 gbps range, you can serve more clients at max throughput than you can with 400 mbps (802.11n).

1 - http://routerjockey.com/2009/05/07/how-does-latency-effect-t...

Every switch uses shared throughput and load balancing. This is no different from a Ethernet gigabit switch unless your switch has a > gigabit Up-link. Think about it - how are 2 clients hard wired to a gigabit Ethernet switch going to exceed 500 megabits of downstream simultaneously.

The Up-link to the switch is the limiting factor.

Your comments only apply to traffic on a separate layer-2 broadcast domain (uplink). Who has a gigabit uplink anyway?

This statement is absolutely false for LAN traffic: "This is no different from a Ethernet gigabit switch".

Even inexpensive gigabit switches are non-blocking these days. This means that they have enough bandwidth for all devices on the LAN to talk to each other at full throughput. This is where the real value of gigabit ethernet comes in. If you need to transfer large files over your LAN, a wired gigabit switch is going to far outperform gigabit wireless.

802.11ac also hasn't been ratified yet, so it's a pre-standard and not guaranteed to work with the final version. This happened with some of the earlier standards but lately it hasn't been much of a problem.

http://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/802.11_Timelines.htm

Why did they call it 802.11ac when there are already specs for 802.11a and 802.11c? This is only going to confuse people.

When they get to z the next standard is aa, then ab, ac, ad, etc. IEEE has never cared about human-readable names, so why start now.

It sounds like IEEE was in charge of naming drive letters in DOS/Windows :)

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