What is the status of 802.11n?

[vnangia]

I'm seeing a number of newer products not saying "Draft-n" or "Wireless N Draft 2.0-compliant". I - and apparently, Wikipedia too - are under the impression that the n-standard is not likely to be finalized for at least another year. Does anyone know whether this standard has become so close to set that not even a firmware upgrade will be needed? Is it "safe" to buy a draft-n router now?

(Background: Having been burnt by a Linksys pre-G router some years ago, I'm reluctant to jump on the n-bandwagon. My Linksys router was in fact completely compatible with the standard, but Linksys refused to release an update - likely to force a new purchase - and as a result, newer G cards saw something advertising itself as a draft G router and opted to connect at B-compliant speeds.)

 

[thiggins]

As usual, marketeers are at work. Which products have you seen without a "draft" designation?

802.11n is still in the draft stage (6.0 is in progress), with release moving from July 2009 to November 2009.

It's likely that firmware and driver upgrades will be needed to bring products into compliance with the released spec. It's also likely that history will repeat itself and manufacturers will not release upgrades for all draft 11n products.

My advice continues to be to hold off on 11n if you don't need higher bandwidth or need to move to the 5 GHz band. If you do decide to experiment with 11n, don't spend a lot of money.

 

[vnangia]

As usual, marketeers are at work. Which products have you seen without a "draft" designation?

802.11n is still in the draft stage (6.0 is in progress), with release moving from July 2009 to November 2009.

It's likely that firmware and driver upgrades will be needed to bring products into compliance with the released spec. It's also likely that history will repeat itself and manufacturers will not release upgrades for all draft 11n products.

My advice continues to be to hold off on 11n if you don't need higher bandwidth or need to move to the 5 GHz band. If you do decide to experiment with 11n, don't spend a lot of money.

Sound advice. We do have some problems with the wireless - but the sad truth is that between our clunky old Linksys, interference and the disaster that is the Windows Vista wireless networking stack, I can't tell which is at fault. Certainly, the higher bandwidth items (Xbox, PS3, NAS) are all connected with cable, but there is an upper limit on how much wiring I can drag. That said, I am in the process of building a FOSS router, and will experiment with Ubuntu to see if I can reduce the dropouts.

As for the devices, I cannot be sure, but my local Microcenter had a bin of new D-Link products lying around that were not carrying any Draft-N designations. I'm guessing that if I looked at it closely enough (perhaps in the dense fine print at the bottom of the box), I'd find the draft info.

 

[vnangia]

In retrospect, this seems prescient. Yesterday, our THIRD Linksys WRT54G in two years upped and died. Naturally, we don't have the box or the manual or anything, so it's another $100 down the drain. There were some warning signs - such as difficulty getting an IP address over the last few weeks, but... c'est la vie.

Since my last experiment with building a router/gateway didn't get too far, we went and bought an inexpensive DIR-615, which our local Microcenter had for $40. So far, so good. The only two pieces of feedback I had were:
1. The menus - unlike the ones I remember from my beloved WGR614 or the WRT54G, there are lots of menus buried inside menus. I'd have liked to have them all at one level.
2. The QOS seems to be worsen performance when you don't have much real-time traffic. We were reliably transferring about 23MBps to our NAS with the Linksys; this dropped to <10MBps with the QOS turned on. Switching off the QOS increased performance to about 25MBps. As this is my first router with QOS features, I must ask: is this normal behaviour for QOS?

 

[thiggins]

The QOS seems to be worsen performance when you don't have much real-time traffic. We were reliably transferring about 23MBps to our NAS with the Linksys; this dropped to <10MBps with the QOS turned on. Switching off the QOS increased performance to about 25MBps.

Is this a wired or wireless transfer? Which QoS setting did you change?

 

[vnangia]

This is within our network, a wired-wired transfer, using, as it happens, identical DGE-530T cards, connected to the same switch. I have a pretty standard 2GB test set (500MB of files <500KB, 500 MB of files between 500KB and 10MB, and a single large 1GB file).

In the DIR-615, there's basically only one QOS option: on or off. Switching it off seemed to increase internal speed significantly - especially on long-sustained transfers, like my 1GB file.