802.11ac in Malaysia for year of 2014

802.11ac

802.11ac is a new Wi-Fi standard announced in the year of 2013.It is a standard which can offer you so called Gigabits high speed Wi-Fi networks. For the very first time the Wi-Fi speed is more than the normal traditional wired Gigabits port.

As a result, all the latest mobile devices are manufactured without the wired port. It's not only apply to mobile tablet but laptop as well. The approach of ultrabook to eliminate the port was quite surprising for me. This trend is being bought up by Apple for sure. The very first mobile laptop without wired port - Apple Macbook Air. If you require a wired port, there is an optional USB convertor for you. Since when the essential legendary wired connector become an OPTIONAL item?

Thunder port to Gigabits port convertor

If you ask me whether the wired port will be extinct? Definitely not- for now. The high speed Wi-Fi is only serve best for the end clients. It isn't meant for mission critical operation. As you know, data travel across the free air is not safe at all and delivery process is unexpected. Besides, the air is a shared medium means you definitely won't have dedicated speed like wired. There are still plenty of issues when the data travel thru the air as a medium.

Back to the 802.11ac story, how will it progress in Malaysia for year of 2014. As expected the new technology is still very pricy. SOHO manufacturer started to offer it before enterprise did. All the Lowyat stores are already busy offering the 802.11ac access point. All the salesman blow this technology up like no other. The issue now is there are limited devices come with 802.11ac compatibility. End up you'll need to purchase the external USB adapter which is just started offer locally. But make sure you go for USB 3.0 version of adapter. Else you'll get stuck at 480Mbps speed due to USB 2.0 speed limitation.

A 802.11ac SOHO router

As per enterprise market, they are starting to offer the new product. But not all. There are still few vendor lacking of 802.11ac product. Personally, I think the enterprise just finished or completed the 802.11n mission. Which they are happy with it. Definitely the next budget allocation won't be these recent years. As mentioned, the end clients is still lacking of 802.11ac compatibility so they have no reasons for the upgrade. In enterprise field, when you upgrade something make sure you utilize it or else it will be a big waste. Perhaps only new deployment with plenty of budget will be adopting 802.11ac infrastructure rather than upgrade the existing infra. Like 802.11n few year back, they need around 3 to 4 year time to fully migrate from legacy 802.11b/g.

In term of technology itself, what is the reason behind making 802.11ac run faster than it previous ancestor 802.11n? There are only two main reason, more channel bonding and more spatial stream compare to 802.11n. Theoretically, 802.11n only can have maximum 40MHz channel bonding and 4 spatial multiple stream. So, 802.11n able to run up to 600Mbps per radio. However, no manufacturer offer 600Mbps per single radio 802.11n devices. I have no idea why, perhaps there is limitation on this. For 802.11ac all it did was just increasing the existing number of channel bonding and data stream to boost the speed over Gigabits. When you need to bond more channel means the legacy 2.4GHz spectrum have no enough non-overlapping channel to support this technology. Therefore, 802.11ac is not compatible with 2.4GHz and only running on 5GHz spectrum.

Channel bonding in 5GHz spectrum

However, there is a good enhancement on 802.11ac which allow simultaneous transmission to multiple clients. Means clients do not require to queue up for Tx and Rx. Maybe, no more airtime fairness issue keep mentioned on 802.11n technology?

Lastly, 802.11ac is worth upgrading for home use which allow HD movie streaming and big file transfer. However, for enterprise market you'll need to wait patiently until the technology become more common for most of the device because the upgrading will cost you a lot. Besides, 802.11n access point still work fast enough and reliable to serve your wireless clients.