back to article Lights, camera, 802.11ax-ion!

Chipmaker Marvell has claimed it will be the first to offer Wi-Fi chipsets that bring the 802.11ax standard to the world. 802.11ax hasn't been signed off yet, but promises to send WiFi towards 10 Gb/s thanks to its use of both multi-user multiple-i-nput and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) and the new Orthogonal frequency-division …

  1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

    That's a fine combination for business, as it promises the chance to serve users with fewer access points than are required today

    I doubt it. At our place (and I suspect many others) the issue that jacks up the number of APs is signal propagation. We have locations where we have an AP per room or two (which may only have one or two people per room) to get decent coverage. All this fancy high speed tech won't help the signal propagation - in fact it'll probably hinder the propagation even more.

    The places that will benefit are more likely to be large, high density communal areas. (e.g. Canteens, lecture theatres, etc)

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      The places that will benefit are more likely to be large, high density communal areas. (e.g. Canteens, lecture theatres, etc)

      In theory I would agree, however, these are also the places most likely to suffer the effects of someone using devices that only support b/g communications; which I suspect will have similar effects on ax-ion as the use of b only devices did on g networks...

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        " b only devices did on g networks..."

        B-only devices force everything into B mode. The simple solution is not to allow them to connect.

    2. Alan Brown Silver badge

      "We have locations where we have an AP per room or two"

      I have 120 APs in one building with 1-2 people per room. Sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

      Unlike 2.4/5GHz 802.1ax runs at 60GHz or higher and gets stopped by a couple of sheets of paper.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @Alan Brown

        Unlike 2.4/5GHz 802.1ax runs at 60GHz or higher

        Where do you get this idea? It runs in existing 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. You're thinking of 802.11ad.

        1. Alan Brown Silver badge

          Re: @Alan Brown

          "You're thinking of 802.11ad."

          You're right. I am.

          Putting more high bandwidth shit down low isn't going to end well though.

      2. Chemical Bob

        "gets stopped by a couple of sheets of paper."

        You're holding it wrong.

  2. Giles C Silver badge

    Hmm 10gig wireless clients will need a 10gig capable access point, how is that meant to work. I haven’t seen many 10gig switches with PoE (or any), so that will be new switches, new APs upgrade the cores to give the switches enough bandwidth.

    Don’t think many people will be implementing this in the short term

    1. Phil Kingston

      Maybe the intention is to power them the old fashioned way

    2. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

      That's why there was these new ethernet standards.

  3. TrumpSlurp the Troll
    Windows

    10 Gig?

    A nice headline number but all the components around, including backhaul network, data storage need to support these speeds and more before this kind of speed is useable.

    Better sharing of connections, yes, but outright speed? If you can't get a reliable 8 Mbits/sec for iPlayer over a 150 Mbits/sec link then what is the point (apart from science)?

    Cue politician sound bites about downloading an episode of GOT in under 10 seconds to your mobile phones.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 10 Gig?

      There's almost no purpose to higher speeds for a single client, I agree, but the headline feature is better sharing of resources since a single client isn't hogging a whole 20 MHz wide channel for itself when it isn't using close to the whole capacity. Instead a couple dozen streaming clients could share that 20 MHz channel instead of having to switch back and forth and waste resources when one is getting data at 20 Mbps over a channel capable of many times more than that.

      It also uses the 20 MHz wide channel more efficiently (higher order modulation, assuming sufficient SNR) so it squeezes more bits out of that before it subdivides it amongst a bunch of clients that have ordinary 1-100 Mbps type needs instead of ridiculous demands for a gigabit.

      But yes, you'll need a faster than one gigabit connection if you will actually have enough clients connected at once doing enough stuff that the gigabit will be a bottleneck. NBase-T lets you go up to 5Gbps over the same wiring you used for gigabit (cat5e or better) which maybe isn't able to squeeze every last drop out of 802.11ax, but how many people will have enough wireless clients going over one AP that regularly exceeding 5Gbps is going to be an issue for them? If so, maybe you need to think about adding another AP...

  4. MrRimmerSIR!

    Chicken, Egg

    I don't understand the moaning about "headline speeds", on an IT website of all places This is a brand new chipset for an as-yet unratified standard. Of course it has to be well ahead of the curve. I'm sure that in time infrastructure will change and make these chips (or their replacements) more useful, just as it did when we were all stringing up fast ethernet and 11b and 11g/gigabit was in the horizon.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Chicken, Egg

      Eh, I'm skeptical there is any need for gigabit speeds to a single client, let alone multi-gigabit speeds. What's the use case? Faster downloads of the latest iOS update? If you are working with huge video or CAD files and have a very fast fileserver, sure, but that's a corner case and one that's usually handled by using a wire.

      We've reached the limit of sensory input to humans, even streaming 4K Blu Ray quality video is only 100 Mbps or so. Anyone who thinks we're going to keep going to 8K, 16K and beyond just because it will become possible needs to read up on diminishing returns, and understand why consumers didn't care about better-than-CD quality audio formats and instead were perfectly happy with less quality in the form of MP3 and AAC.

      Not saying we'll never need gigabit speeds to a single client, just that there isn't anything that needs a gigabit today or on the horizon, aside from a few niche cases that don't justify the development cost. Luckily 802.11ax is about using spectrum more efficiently to allow more clients to transmit simultaneously, rather than being about letting one client use more of it at once like previous standards.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Chicken, Egg

        "Anyone who thinks we're going to keep going to 8K, 16K and beyond just because it will become possible needs to read up on diminishing returns"

        Unlike the "better than CD" issue, 8k/16k and friends will allow larger screens and therefore wider fields of view, which is a major selling point.

        "Better than CD" failed because noone could hear the difference - CDs were already close to as good as the range of the human ear

        Whilst colour and dynamic brightness ranges are almost there now, there's a lot of resolution and field of view to go before TV matches the human eye.

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