802.11n Draft 2.0 Approved by Working Group

[Geeks Are Sexy] writes "Yes folks, the 802.11 Working Group has finally approved Draft 2.0 of the 802.11n spec, bringing us a step closer to its final form. 'With the positive vote from the 802.11n Working Group, the Wi-Fi Alliance will now begin officially certifying equipment as being compliant with Draft 2.0. That's an important step, as official Draft 2.0-compliant gear is guaranteed to be fully compatible with the final 802.11n standard.'"

About f***ing time

[Anonymous Coward]

It will take a couple of months at least for certified equipment to appear. Having participated in a couple of the working group meetings, I can say that (unfortunately) one of the unsaid goals for any of the participating companies was to make sure that none of their competitor's proposals go through as is. The rationale being that the competitor would have a chip design almost ready to go with that technique and will be faster to hit the market and grab market share...

Re:802.11n -- what's the point?

[Martin Blank]

You're thinking mostly home. Think full-scale enterprise, like I have to. It takes very little to saturate the links, especially when you factor in how much of the operations are now handled over the network. It's not just a few e-mails; Outlook can consume significant bandwidth (as can any client that keeps at least a copy client-side), and many companies require all data to be kept on network shares. Throw in roaming profiles and group policy-based software installations (even using BITS), and you can eat up wireless bandwidth very quickly.

The ability to match wire speeds for numerous users is going to be a huge benefit to companies that want to deploy wireless for something other than convenience in the conference rooms. Even when using a proper channel layout, even using 802.11a, you still have bandwidth contention within a channel on a single AP, and it mars the experience for the general user. Splitting higher bandwidth will assist in alleviating these issues.

Re:802.11n -- what's the point?

[volsung]

It would be nice if the shift to 802.11n meant that we saw more built-in support for the 5 GHz band. 802.11a seems to have mostly died in the consumer market, while the 2.4 GHz band with its overlapping channels gets more and more congested with b/g devices. Unless you live in low density housing, you aren't going to get anywhere near 54 Mbps to your router, even if you wanted to.

Unfortunately, since 802.11n allows for 2.4 GHz and/or 5 GHz operation, there are some people who are pessimistic that we'll see many consumer grade devices that are dual band. (A quick check revealed that the Airport Extreme base station does both 2.4 and 5 GHz, which is nice, but I can't tell if the Macbooks with draft-n cards do both bands as well.)

Re:802.11n -- what's the point?

[drinkypoo]

Its so much more effort than running an unslightly wire and the wireless still 'feels' slow on BF2. Other games that arent as network demanding may fare better. Now I just run a wire when I want to play just to be extra safe and leave wireless for when im not gaming.

I just want to jump in here and say that running a wire is much, much easier than most people think it is. The only time it can really be a pain is when you live in an apartment... in which case you are likely to have neighbors polluting the region of the radio spectrum near 2.4GHz.

In fact, you don't even need to know anything about wiring to install a network cable. All you need to know is how you're going to run the cable. The connectors have color codes on them (if you buy anything but the very cheapest) and you can just press the wires into the proper areas, matching their color codes, and snap the little crimp connectors on.

Wireless is indeed the answer in some situations - those situations are all ones in which you're moving around, or a remote site to which you cannot run a wire. For everything else, you owe it to yourself to run a wire. You can run 100Mbps for hundreds of meters...

That's great, but what I want to know is...

[negated]

...will it include priority packet support for Duke Nukem Forever?

Re:They need to prioritize

[soleblaze]

Doesn't matter about limiting the tries per mac. A majority of tools designed to crack WPA are done via offline attacks. You sniff the 4 way auth handshake, and with that you can use an offline password cracker, such as cowpatty, against it. Cowpatty also supports hashes (rainbow table attack) and the church of wifi released hashes for 1000 of the most common ssids using a ~174k dictionary. (That's the major problem with using a hash attack, the SSID is used as salt with WPA). So in the end, it's just weak passwords that's the problem.