News Buffalo details 802.11ac 1.75Gb/s wireless router

Buffalo has released details of its upcoming 802.11ac products, boasting Wi-Fi bandwidth of 1.75Gb/s.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/01/18/buffalo-802-11ac-router/1

 

My house is already wired up for gigabit ethernet, so it'll be a while before I feel the need to replace my trusty DIR-655.

 

this 802.11ac will be using 5 GHz, so how's its range compared to 2.4 GHz 802.11n routers?

it's no use having super fast connection when you have to bridge it across your house. the resulting speed after bridging will be no better than single large coverage N router.

 

Higher frequencies = more bandwidth, but harder to diffract around corners. So the signal range will most likely be reduced indoors, and the device will probably switch down to 802.11n at 2.4Ghz.

 

I only use wireless for my phone, everything else is wired so I don't get the drop out's that happen's sometimes on Wireless dependant on what equipment is near the router.

 

I will be very interested to see what real world ranges and speeds are of 802.11ac. Of course the issue for me is nothing supports it yet. Though of course you have to start somewhere.

If it is anything like 802.11n 2.4/5ghz though, I'd imagine that that 1.3Gbps is going to translate in to more like 200-300Mbps of real world speed in ideal scenarios, which is still a pretty good improvement on 802.11n.

However, my wired 1Gbps ethernet is probably still going to blow it out of the water in all real world scenarios. Of course down the road when things like tabs and laptops incorporate 802.11ac I'll certainly get a router that will. For now though, 802.11n 150Mbps is all I need, because I don't have a wireless device that can handle more than that.

What I am looking forward to more than this is low power and inexpensive 10GBE. I did just wire my house last year for 1GBE with Cat 5e, but it wouldn't take too much to rewire it with some Cat 6A for 10GBE if the switches could come down under $150 and the NICs would drop under $100 each (and use less than 8w/3w respectively). Probably just a matter of another 2-3 years before we see that, but I anxiously await that day when I need RAID setups to saturate my 10GBE network (and maybe need an upgraded file server to also handle pushing/pulling that much data to disks). 110MB/sec just seems so sedate in comparison to 1000MB/sec+ capable links (even if none of my disks, even SSDs can handle that, I'd still love to be able to push 200-300MB/sec to/from a 3 disk RAID5 array and heck there are plenty of single disk 7200rpm 3.5 inch drives that can handle over 130MB/sec average speeds these days, let alone the 110MB/sec limit of GBE).

 

So is AC going to take over fron N, just as N took over from G?

Given that I still have a G wifi network in my house, this is a possibility.

 

I cant wait for the new standard to roll out. My home network has about a dozen computers, at least 4 of which need high-bandwidth connections at all hours of the day and night, and several other systems need internet, but don't have 802.11n adapters. So trying to connect over a 5-port + wireless-n router is a bit of a stretch. I plan on getting a proper 8+ port switch, but a few of the workstations that need a lot of bandwidth could just as easily use wireless, should the sireless be fast enough. and 802.11n just dosent cut it.

 

You still need cards that can handle it.

Also, it won't run much faster (if at all) than Gigabit ethernet, so if you have this wired, there is little reason to dump it (it's cheaper and more reliable). Not many systems can push that much data over ethernet and then you have the wireless overhead and connection quality.

Still, it's a BIG jump for wireless. I want it!

 

Why? Just for e-Peen presumably? What possible real world use do you have for this? In what way would it improve your life, after the initial warm fuzzy glow of seeing 1,000 MB/s going from a RAM disk on one machine to a RAM disk on another just to prove it works?

 

Not 1000MB/s, but having more than 110MB/s would be nice. If I'm pulling from SSD to SSD over a network having 300-400MB/s cuts transfer times notably. We've had GigE for 10 years now, it's time for an upgrade!

 

Totally agreed.
Gigabit E is enough to use it as a slow internal drive, but a bit more would be nice at times.

There was rumors that 10Gbe was due start of this year, I wonder what happened.

 

Agreed it would be nice, but 110MB/s is still pretty healthy. I doubt many average users (or even 99.9% of enthusiast power users) are shuffling multiple GBs around their home networks enough that 10GbE would measurably improve their life.

In a corporate environment, 10GbE can be invaluable, at least in the server room - a heavily used corporate network with many clients and some high power servers may be hammering server resources hard enough to generate multiple Gb/s of traffic, such that 1GbE would be a real bottleneck.

But for home use, unless you have some kind of monster power user requirements (like editing uncompressed HD video stored on a FAST file server, which is hardly a standard usage case in the home) 1GbE is more than fast enough. This means IMHO 10GbE is unlikely to reach mass market adoption in the near term, and prices will stay high.

 

TBH I would be very happy with wireless that can reliably match Fast Ethernet for home use. Transfer speeds 10MB/s+ would be brilliant for general home use (file transfer, streaming etc) and certainly an improvement on what we could consider the standard for the majority of people; (802.11g/n).

Until I get the walls re-done in my house (5+ years) I don't really want to go down the wired LAN route (done properly with channels and LAN ports - like the electrics), therefore fast reliable wireless is preffered option to trailing cables or home plugs.

 

You can buy 10Gbe network cards from Supermicro and Intel, if you have the money...

 

bummer to bad Buffalo isnt allowed to sell their networking equipment in the US >.<

 

Those are fiber optic, and don't exactly work with a common home router.

 

Hopefully 802.11ac will have better range then 802.11n. I'm still using 802.11g because in my house I can't get enough range with 802.11n.

 

how many user can access it?
theoretical(spec) value =?
practical value=?