As is always the case with wireless LANs, the residential market gets the new technologies first. Here’s a quick look at Netgear’s 802.11ac announcement.
Netgear yesterday announced a couple of additions to their 802.11ac line, previously limited to the three-stream R6300 1.3 Gbps router. We need to leave aside at present, once again, any discussion here about the lack of an official 802.11ac standard and an interoperability spec from the Wi-Fi Alliance, also missing at present. The former should appear around the end of next year, and the latter in the first quarter of next year. And no matter regardless – at this point, as was the case with .11g and .11n, early products will very, very likely be compliant with both the spec and the standard when these gel. And, also regardless, we’re talking products aimed purely at early adopters in the residential space who are looking for the best possible performance in media sharing, video streaming, and etc.
The biggest issue with the previous-announced router was, of course, no corresponding client. The new A6200 USB adapter (US$69.99 list) addresses that, and is also backwards-compatible with 802.11b/g/n. Note, though, that the A6200 is limited to two 802.11ac streams, and thus 867 Mbps, and is regardless limited by the USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) interface. A second router, the less-powerful (two-stream) R6200, was also announced, but given the minuscule $20 difference in list price between the two routers (US$199.99 vs. $179.99), it doesn’t seem likely that a whole lot of R6200s will be sold, especially given the early-adopter market’s desire for the latest fire-breathing, barn-burning performance. But, regardless, Netgear will, as of July, anyway, be shipping both ends of the latest wireless LAN technology.
Many will of course note that, despite theoretical over-the-air speeds that could exceed 1 Gbps on the R6300, there is but a gigabit-Ethernet port on the router. Fear not; as is always the case, it’s very unlikely that Layer-7 throughput will be anywhere near a gigabit per second. Ditto for the A6200 USB adapter, which is ultimately limited, as was noted above, by the effective throughput of the USB 2.0 port. But the question remains: just how close to the upper bounds of the relevant hardware interface will we get? And how much faster will the 802.11ac router/client pair be than corresponding 802.11n products? And what kind of performance boost over current products might we get when the .11ac units operate in .11n mode? I’m hoping to have review units in July to answer exactly that question, and I will let you know. In the meantime, expect a good number of .11ac announcements in the residential/SMB space this year – but I’m still not expecting real volumes of enterprise-class products until about a year from now. Hopefully we can do a formal Network World Clear Choice test shortly thereafter. And, don’t worry – I’m sure that APs with 10+ Gbps Ethernet ports and clients that are either built-in (PCIe) or compatible with USB 3.0 are in development now as well.
