News

Wireless LAN speeds up to 100 megabits from US Robotics

The forgotten modem company, US Robotics, will roll out the first 100 megabit 802.11g wireless Ethernet system at this weeks WLAN Event in London. The system uses technology from Texas Instruments which runs at twice the normal 11g speed.

As foreshadowed here on NewsWireless.Net the TI version of 802.11g will not suffer from the problems of slow-down which affect Broadcom based systems in the presence of a legacy WLAN client. So the USR devices will run at the full 100 megabits signal speed even if there are users with 802.11b devices in the area.

In addition to going to a version of 11g which TI believes will follow the official standard (or lead it!) later this year, TI has its own technology which it uses to double the data throughput of wireless Ethernet.

"We think we can support 45 users over one access point, with voice over IP, and a full 512K data pipe, within a 130 metre range; and we use just one channel for the full 100 megabits," said Peter Blampied, who is USR director of sales and operations for EMEA. "It's not a dual-channel device like some others on the market."

Samples will be available for corporate customers to evaluate from the end of May; and full production will start shipping end July.

Price hasn't been defined, but "will be close to the cost of a Netgear product in the 11g market" was the guidance given.

USR has held back from the early pre-standard offerings of 54 megabit wireless in this 2.4 GHz frequency range, because it feared that customers in the corporate market would be reluctant to buy something that needed wholesale upgrades within a year.

"In fact, it was a courageous decision on our part," admitted Blampied. "We've had to watch rivals sell a huge number of Wireless-G parts, particularly into the home market, and there have been times when we did wonder whether we'd got it right."

The company was one of the world's most successful modem makers till the early 90s, when it was taken over by 3Com - not for the sake of the product range, but because of 3Com's excellent distributor chain to retail. Several market leading products were dropped, or allowed to languish - the Palm hand-held range amongst these. Now, bought out of 3Com, it is undergoing something of a resurgence.

These days, the company is looking to the corporate market as much as the individual buyer, and sees wireless as the next big stage in the development of the Internet.

"Security isn't an issue; in our view, it's probable that most wired Ethernet LANs are less secure than a properly secure WiFi network, in fact," said Blampied.

Throughput of wireless LAN technology is frequently obscured by "conventional" measurements. The normal 802.11g speed is quoted as 54 megabits, but in reality, this will mean that even if there is only one user on the WLAN and conditions are ideal, there's only going to be 22 megabits of actual data travelling into the device.

A more realistic table of expected throughput for the new USR range has been drawn up. It shows that with ten users, the device will run around ten times the speed of 802.11b - so where the standard 11b device would give each of ten users around 256Kbits, at 30 metre range, this would keep 50 users alive at 512 Kbits.

Strangely, although Texas Instruments has announced a dual 11a/11g chip set, USR believes there's no call for 11a technology, not even in corporate markets.

In the domestic market, most observers would agree with this for the foreseeable future; but our analysis suggests that in dense, urban areas with multiple enterprise users, the use of 11a technology will be essential to avoid cell overlap.

Against this, Blampied advanced the argument that unlike 11g's 2.4 GHz frequency, 11a spectrum isn't the same all around the world, making stock-keeping very complex.

This may turn out to be an illusion. Portugal, for example, has ruled out WiFi altogether, on the grounds that it interferes with a military spectrum use there; but pragmatically, nobody outside Portugal believes the country can possibly police this once commodity personal computers, hand-helds and even phones start using this as standard.

The company will ship two versions of the access point, plus a PC Card and a PCI card in July; and hand-held devices will be catered for in September with a choice of CompactFlash or USB driven adapters.

By then, most observers would expect to see D-Link adopt the same TI chipset.