Thursday, October 07, 2004

Belkin Ups the WiFi Ante With 802.11n Adapter
Standards take a long time to come to market even in the faster than normal world of WiFi. In late October Belkin is going to jump the gun and introduce an 802.11n WiFi card and router that will take wireless transmission rates from G's current 54 Mbits per second to a blazing 135 Mbits per second.

According to Tom's Hardware, "802.11n proposals were submitted by 61 organizations in August and discussed by the TGn. The majority of papers were divided in groups supporting the currently used 20 MHz bandwidth (Airgo, Broadcom, Conexant, Mitsubishi, Motorola, STMicro, Texas Instruments) and groups who favor to double the bandwidth to 40 MHz (Atheros, Intel, Matsushita, Philips, Sony). Some, such as Agere, have submitted ideas to support both bandwidths for bandwidths of up to 540 Mbit/s.

"The key advantage of using the 20 MHz band is seamless backwards compatibility with existing 802.11 b/g networks. According to Belkin, Pre-N can be easily integrated in existing networks and - other than g - will operate at full speed - which means that data throughput will not drop to the lowest common networking speed in mixed-mode environments."

Routers will be priced at $180 and add-in cards for $130. And as always, going pre-standard is playing at your own risk, but here's to the companies that drive the standards forward as quickly as they can.

Niggling fine print details: But it probably still won't travel the 75 feet through two plasterboard walls so I can nonwire the computer all the way over there with the six right here.
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