John W. Cox senior editor Network World

Dan,

thanks for posting this. As I mentioned in our email exchange, my reaction was "I wish I'd thought of that."

The 11n power picture is still developing.

There seems to be pretty rapid adoption of 11n in some verticals, notably education, and they seem to be adopting a mix of solutions, or putting off a decision until .3at is ratified and standards-based products are available. In the meantime, they're accepting some performance trade-offs at the 11n access point.

One or two vendors say they have some secret sauce that allows full 11n radio operation with existing 802.3af systems (Siemens is one).

Our wireless newsletter whiz, Joanie Wexler, has written about 11n power issues, including a two-part overview here and here.

Power is also a moving target. On the 11n side, we can expect that radio silicon advances will lower power consumption. And the IEEE VHT working group could, I suppose, target low or lower power requirements or at least coordinate some discussions with the 802.3at folks.

One thing I'm unsure of is whether the higher throughput at either under-6 or 60 GHz would really demand signifcantly more power. 802.11a at 5GHz was a huge throughput jump over 11b at 2.4GHz, but stayed well within existing PoE capabilities.