Cisco Subnet's eyes were drawn today by the shiny chic-looking router on Cisco's home page - Cisco 
Linksys Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router. And we're not the only ones to admire its supermodel curve-appeal (c'mon, you can't say the same about many routers on the market today), Greg Michetti has a review of the product in his blog at Canoe Technology.
He writes:
Now I’m all for functionality ahead of style but those drab, blue/grey clunky-looking home Linksys routers and switches seemed to look out of place; even when placed next to those even homelier home modems hustled by Shaw, Rogers and Telus.
However, the new Linksys WRT610N Dual-N band (around $200) wireless router may change all that in more ways than one. This curvy new, dark-metallic-blue-Star-Trek-like, Gigabit-speed unit actually looks cool when placed on the desktop of your home office.
Read his full review here.
More from Cisco Subnet:
* Cisco unveils virtual switch; expands NX-OS across its entire data center family
* 100% of CCIE growth outside the U.S.
* Jimmy Ray Purser's Top 5 recon hack tools
* Cisco design certification pay slides while Cisco security pay increases
* Riverbed adds VMware to the Riverbed Service Platform
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Necesity for Dual-N?
Can someone educate me why one would need 2 X 300Mbps (or 2 X 100Mbps) bandwidth at home while most of us only have 2M - 10Mbps Internet connection?
If you take into account the Internet also has congestions, latencies and packet drops, your effective Internet throughput is much lower let alone if you were to cross continents to your destinations.
Performance issues, or conflicts for bandwidth, at home, are not because the bottleneck is home, but "It's the Internet, Stupid!"...Bill
Its simple... try to stream
Its simple... try to stream HD video over wireless and you will see the need.
Of course its not going to increase your internet performance.
Reply to dual-N necessity
Yes, the streaming of video to multiple devices throughout the home from a local server (such as an iTunes library) is the primary driver behind needing LAN bandwidth that exceeds your WAN bandwidth. However, I aqree that at this point, two 11n radios in the home does seem like a bit of overkill. I'm told that HDTV consumes about 7Mbps and Standard-Definition Video consumes about 1Mbps. A single 11n radio would likely do it for most consumers at this point.
That said, a family might have several PCs and/or Macs belonging to different family members throughout the house. And the family may have downloaded any number of movies to an iTunes library of content. Different family members throughout the home may wish to simultaneously access one or more movies on a PC, Mac, AppleTV device, and so forth, while others may need local bandwidth to get access the home Internet connection. It's all this local bandwidth-sharing that chews up the bandwidth.
In addition, those lucky souls having FIOS (fiber to the home service from Verizon) or AT&T Uverse (fiber to the curb) are able to get significantly greater bandwidth in their Internet access link/WAN, opening the door to other new high-bandwidth applications that could make their way throughout the home. Hope this helps!
Joanie Wexler, Author of Network World's Wireless newsletter.
Dual-N Necessity
Thanks for the replies.
Let's do the math here. Assume all users in a hosehold are watching HD video from a local stream server simultaneously, and they all watching different contents, and all streams are UDP based (so we can calculate the full bandwidth in half-duplex mode).
2 x 300M/7M = 85
How often we even have 8 people at home to do this task and in what occassion? Ironically according to this ABC report, average American family size is 2.6:
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Moms/story?id=1445039
I think 802.11g can easily handle it. I see .11N is really meant for enterprise LANs.
I see scientists or radio engineers have a more challenging task they face on, say, coming up with technologies that enable watching a smoother CNN video stream realtime on our "3G" phones instead of overkilling the local demand for bandwidth at home. With the way it is going, I would not be surprised if someone starts talking about ".11z" 3 year from now promising "600M" throughput at home.
Are general consumers being misled?
Followup reply
Hi, wopro - Your points are well made. A few things I would also consider:
- I would use "2 X 100" instead of "2 X 300" in your formula. 300Mbps is the current 11n data-connect rate; actual throughput of early 11n products is, at best, 170Mbps, and those are for the high-end enterprise-class devices. Consumer devices offer lower throughput, but the minimum is generally 100Mbps (2x that of 11a and 11g).
- Granted, with one person watching a HDTV movie and using the 100Mbps throughput-per-radio figure, that still leaves 28Mbps of bandwidth left over (rather than your 85Mbps). 28Mbps should potentially serve 4 additional HD movies streamed simultaneously. What's the likelihood of 5 people watching HD movies within a single household from different devices at the same time? Probably slight, as you note.
- However, some users might be downloading iTunes and playing games across the LAN. Also, there might be an IP surveillance system/nanny cam in place. Eventually, a "home area network" might enter the scene, whereby sensors are embedded in virtually every object in the house (and on user's persons) to communicate status, temperature, motion, blood pressure, etc. to some application either in a "home wiring closet" or at a remote site (security company, police, medical professional, utility company, homeowner at work, etc.). In other words, there might be a constant stream of info using the LAN to get to the Internet connection running in the background, even without users actively engaged in multimedia, collaborative, and data activities. That will work best when we all have fiber Ethernet ISP connections, of course!
-Another significant point about 11n is that it offers comparable throughput to 11a and 11g at 2x the coverage range. If you're lucky enough to live in a large home, you might need 11n just to reach all the nooks and crannies you want without having to add multiple APs to do so (multiple APs, incidentally, confuse the heck out of many ISPs when they come to set up your broadband Internet service).
Still, I agree with you that these are early days for the situations I described to be commonplace, and average users in average sized homes can probably get by just fine with a legacy network for the foreseeable future. If they're willing to pay $600 for an iPhone, then another $600 for a "better" iPhone a year later, there's no reason to think they wouldn't be amenable to meeting their needs now with 11a or g or a single-radio 11n device, then upgrading to the *standard* 11n when it is available - and then, again, upgrading to 2 11n radios when the masses of over-the-air content really kick in.
Replied Reply
Joanie, Thanks for the thoughtful points.
I guess all I have been trying to say is that with the current level of applications at home, the bottleneck is really not on the LAN side, but the Interent. And developments in the wireless industry have a better job or more urgent task to do in the wireless mobile area rather than keep focusing on the home LAN.