Is it worth buy "Draft-N" equipment now, or wait?

Hi,

I'm thinking of upgrading my wireless network equipment to "11n". I
gather that there are "Draft-N 2.0" equipment (routers and adapters)
now, but I was wondering if it'd be better to wait until the "official"
adoption takes place and for "official" 11n-compliant equipment is
available?

If the answer is that the "Draft-N 2.0" equipment is ok, any
recommendations for both a router and desktop adapters?

Thanks,
Jim

Jeff Liebermann wrote:

> Fasten your seat belt please.

If you thought marketing claims about "54M" were misleading bordering on
fraud, just wait til the Wireless N claims get thrown around.

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Jeff Liebermann wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:09:52 -0400, ohaya <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>
>>I'm thinking of upgrading my wireless network equipment to "11n". I
>>gather that there are "Draft-N 2.0" equipment (routers and adapters)
>>now, but I was wondering if it'd be better to wait until the "official"
>>adoption takes place and for "official" 11n-compliant equipment is
>>available?
>>
>>If the answer is that the "Draft-N 2.0" equipment is ok, any
>>recommendations for both a router and desktop adapters?
>
>
> Well, what problem are you trying to solve by replacing whatever you
> are currently using?
> Are you looking for:
> More range?
> More speed?
> More reliability?
> Fewer errors?
> Less susceptibility to reflections?
> Less interference?
> You can actually get improvements in all of these, but only a few at a
> time. There's no free lunch with RF. Note that you'll probably need
> to also replace your client radios (the ones in your computahs) to be
> 802.11 Draft-N 2.0 release whatever compliant. That's often
> difficult, expensive, or impossible. Change everything?
>
> Does your client radio have the ability to take advantage of spatial
> multiplexing MIMO? If it's a single stream MIMO, as found in almost
> all laptop radios with a single antenna, multiple streams are not
> going to happen. Therefore, no speed or reflection immunity
> improvements. Note that when I say single antenna, I don't mean the
> two antenna diversity antenna system found in most laptops, which is
> really a single receiver, that switches between two possible antennas.
> For spatial diversity MIMO to work, you need one receiver per antenna.
>
> I can't wait to see the porcupine antenna mess at the client end. More
> likely, it will be an internal PCB (printed circuit board) antenna,
> with no projecting monopoles. Also, external antennas are going to be
> difficult, weird looking, pricey and/or impossible.
>
> In my never humble opinion, I would wait. My guess(tm) is that it
> will take a few months after the official announcement or premature
> leak for the manufacturers to deliver badly tested firmware and
> products. The hype, feature bloat, and proprietary enhancements will
> surely follow. Certainly some litigation such as the CSIRO mess. In
> most cases, methinks the major improvements offered by MIMO will be in
> the area of speed and reflection tolerance. I can't wait to see the
> numbers for Linksys and Buffalo with their 3x speed or 5x range hype.
> There will be benchmark tests, magazine articles, and the usual
> premature conclusions. In other words, a gigantic muddle that far
> exceeds any of the current 802.11 pre-N confusion. Fasten your seat
> belt please.
>
>
>

Jeff,

Thanks for your thoughtful and reasoned response. Some (maybe a lot)
was "over my head" (I'm technical, but wireless/radio tech is not my
specialty... for that, I'm mainly a "user").

To answer the question you asked, I'm mostly looking towards/hoping for
faster speeds on wireless.

When we built our current house, awhile ago, I had pre-wired some of it
with CAT5, but over time, I'm finding that there were places that I
wished that I had wired-to.

So, I've been slowly dabbling (not in a huge way) with adding wireless
to the desktops in my house.

Members of my family have laptops, but wireless speed with those is not
a primary issue (to me ).

I currently have a couple of 11G routers and/or 11g routers setup as APs
(for coverage), and a small NAS that I use to share files within the
house and as a personal FTP server, but I've been seeing ads for "Draft
N 2.0" routers with prices that are pretty cheap, so was thinking that
maybe it's time for "the next step".

Anyway, as I kind of suspected, it sounds like from what you said that
it's probably a little early. Even though, professionally, I guess that
I'd be considered "high tech", I tend to be less-than-bleeding-edge, and
more "cheap tech" than "high tech" , so I'll probably just wait a bit
to see how all of this "N" stuff pans out.

Following this NG, among other things is helpful with respect to that.

Thanks again,
Jim