Five years have passed since the first 802.11n devices implementing a draft of the now-finalized specification hit the market. Over the years 802.11n support has become ubiquitous in the industry. Everything from smartphones to high-end notebooks support the standard. Even low cost products like the $99 Apple TV or $49 Roku LT ship with 802.11n support. With real world transfer speeds ranging from 30Mbps at the low end to 150Mbps at the high end, 802.11n is simply too slow to quickly move large files. It wasn’t too long ago that 100MB/s was reserved for high-end hard drives in PCs. Today, with SSDs capable of sustaining transfers of over 500MB/s, the bottleneck in many wireless homes is increasingly becoming WiFi.
The IEEE has been working on the specification for the fifth generation of WiFi: 802.11ac. Today that spec is in its draft stages and is expected to be finalized by the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013. The first 802.11ac chipsets have already been announced by Broadcom, with the first devices (routers, USB dongles, PCIe cards and OEM systems) shipping very shortly. Broadcom expects that the final version of the 802.11ac spec will be only marginally different from the current draft and any changes it expects to be able to address in software.
If you’re wondering where the ‘ac’ suffix comes from, the IEEE simply ran out of single letters. Every technical paper released by the IEEE for the 802.11 project is assigned a letter. The vast majority of these papers aren’t broad, networking standards which is why you never hear about them. The ones that end up as standards gain popularity but the nomenclature is purely linear use of the alphabet.
I’m looking forward to this.
5th January 2012
He raises some good points about how Jobs’s faults have been overlooked by the media for a long time.
So, back before the Internet was popular, advertisers had to convey to customers why they should use email and online shopping. These are the ads they used. More here.
Notes: 135
I’m dual-booting for now, but so far liking it. I got sick of not having the development tools I wanted on Windows, so I thought I would give this a try. Feel free to leave any advice or tips or recommendations for other distros to try.
Flashback.B performs a “vmcheck”. If virtualization is detected, the trojan aborts itself.
Apple started allowing users to run two additional instances of virtualized OS X with the release of Lion.
VMware-aware malware (say that ten times fast!) is a common anti-research technique used within the Windows ecosystem, but not yet so in Mac’s. It appears that Mac malware authors are anticipating that researchers will begin to use virtualized environments during analysis, and are taking steps to hamper such efforts.
This is interesting. Macs have never been targeted as much for viruses due to their low percentage of the market, but it looks like malware writers are finally turning their attention to them.
The inventor of C and a person probably more influential on modern computing than Steve Jobs ever was has died today.
