The Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has started work on WiFi the next generation. While that news in itself might not exactly rock your socks off, the small matter of a big speed increase might. Word is that WiFi TNG could be fast, very fast indeed. Anyone fancy some 1 gigabit per second wireless networking?
Of course, there are a couple of caveats for the average consumer that need to be thrown in the mix here: firstly any WiFi standard upgrade is at least a year or two away yet, and secondly just because your WiFi network will support gigabit speeds that doesn't mean the Internet connection feeding it will run any faster.
So why the excitement? Seriously speedy wireless network could herald the death of Ethernet, simple as that. Assuming the thing can be engineered to be both robust enough as well as quick enough, that is. Certainly 1 Gbps is fast enough as raw encoding rates go, but what about the reliability factor?
From what I can gather it could be a case of perm any one from three, with the three in question being speed, distance and robustness. So the technology can be tweaked to provide better range at the expense of throughput and reliability, or better reliability at the expense of throughput and range for example. However, providing a massive boost to all three would appear to be something of a fantasy right now.
That said, I applaud the IEEE for the work it is doing on 802.11ac and wish it all the best in getting that 1Gbps wireless that we all want, if not actually need. That said, I don't think that the reliable, rangy and speedy Gigabit Ethernet is going to be added to the endangered networks list any time soon.
