

First Gigabit Wi-Fi Routers Ready to Launch - pooriaazimi
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/26/first-gigabit-wi-fi-routers-ready-to-launch/

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bradleyland
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...](http://routerjockey.com/2009/05/07/how-does-latency-effect-
throughput/)

~~~
goggles99
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.

~~~
bradleyland
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.

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trout
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>

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wavephorm
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.

~~~
wmf
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.

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

