An article written by G.T. Hill, director of technical marketing at Ruckus Wireless, on Network World on the topic of 802.11ac caught our attention. For the uninitiated, 802.11ac is the next iteration of the Wi-Fi standard for wireless networking, and is sometimes being touted as Gigabit Wi-Fi for its support for 80MHz channels and ability to bond a greater number of channels together for higher throughput.

We reported earlier this month on the first 802.11ac Wi-Fi chips by chip maker Broadcom that were unveiled at CES; consumer devices equipped with 802.11ac are expected to enter the market by end-2012.

Contrary to general perception, Hill says the ability to bond up to eight channels in 802.11ac comes at the expense of lowered overall capacity to support more wireless devices. This is little consequence in consumer devices, which typically have a few devices connected to one access point (AP). The situation is different for businesses however, which actually favor the use of more APs to support a higher density of wireless devices. To reduce interference, these APs should optimally be located on different channels, observes Hill.

Ultimately, he concedes that 802.11ac does offer improvements for the Wi-Fi industry, "primarily because it forces clients to add support for the capacity-rich 5GHz spectrum. Current enterprise APs already support both bands." The implicit message of the article? You don't need to wait for 802.11ac before deploying a business-grade Wi-Fi network.

For more:
- check out this article at Network World

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