Wireless technology is becoming main stream in recent years. When home users considering building a home network a lot of them, if not most of them end up choosing Wi-Fi network, i.e. 802.11b or the latest 802.11g, since wireless networks have become fast and easy to install especially with the help of Windows zero configuration feature.

Wireless networks are also taking a major step in to business with a growing number of companies deploying hotspots across corporate offices.

With current Wi-Fi technology, wireless networks are limited to connecting to the Internet or to the local network using computers. Multimedia devices that use wireless technology to stream video and audio are not very popular, mostly due to the limited range and bandwidth of 802.11b. Even 802.11g is not fast enough to fulfill the high bandwidth requirements of video streaming.

A new emerging technology promises to overcome the limitation of current wireless standards. The new technology, called 802.11n or MIMO (pronounced My-moh), which stands for Multiple Input – Multiple Output. IEEE has not yet set the standard specs, which are expected to be finalized sometimes next year, but that is not stopping companies to come out with 802.11n products based on the draft proposal submitted to IEEE.
Today’s Wi-Fi radios use 20-MHz of analog baseband bandwidth to transmit information across the two frequencies used by 802.11b/g, and 802.11a. Moving to 802.11n will require approximately 100 MHz of bandwidth.

The IEEE 802.11n standard is currently deadlocked between the TGN Sync proposal, which Intel supports, and the competing WWiSE proposal. TGn Sync has proposed using 40-MHz channels in the 5-GHz spectrum band used by 802.11a, while WWiSE’s proposal involves using 20-MHz channels in the 2.4-GHz band used by 802.11b/g radios.

Pages: 1 2