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WiFi for the home, at 100 megabits - D-Link upgrades Xtreme

The Xtreme G brand from D-Link wasn't that extreme, really: it was a standard 802.11g variant of WiFi. Until this week, that is - when the company doubled throughput by upgrading the firmware.

"Xtreme G is fully interoperable and protects all current standards and legacy devices. That means it delivers both blazingly fast throughput speed and unprecedented interoperability between 802.11 technologies and multi-vendor environments," said Steven Joe, President of D-Link.

The upgrade is free. Before the upgrade, the devices function as standard 54 megabit WiFi 802.11g; after the upgrade, they carry on being fully compatible with 11b and 11g; but they also acquire five different compression systems to increase throughput.

The actual throughput of a standard "54 megabit per second" 11g device is never going to be 54 megabits; it tops out around 22 megabits, and only if it's the sole device attached to the wireless network. The actual throughput of the D-Link Xtreme, when upgraded, is officially twice that, and they tell me they are "seeing" up to 60 megabits of data per second.

Here's how they explain it:

The D-Link Xtreme G upgrade employs five cutting-edge hardware-based compression technologies to achieve a significant boost in performance within the 2.4GHz frequency range.

· Packet Bursting: The packet bursting technique puts more data into a single transmission, allowing more raw data to be stuffed into each packet and as a result not only delivers much more data, but also executes this process with less traffic on the network. Packet bursting transforms lengthy binary code into simple equations, resulting in an overall reduction in the number of 1s and 0s being sent over the network. It is also the technique defined as one of the methods for performance improvement in the IEEE 802.11e QOS draft standard.

· Fast Frames: The fast frames technique enhances data throughput by increasing the number of bits sent per data frame and accelerating the timing of a data frame with a dynamic transmit optimisations. This technology enhances the Packet Bursting capability synergistically to provide accelerated performance results. The fast frames technique is also based on the 802.11e QOS draft standard.

· Hardware Compression and Encryption: Xtreme G uses the Atheros AR5002 chipset which employs special engines to compress and encrypt data. These hardware engines operate in real-time to enhance throughput by implementing standard algorithms and compressing data prior to transmission and after reception.

· Multi-Channel Bonding: Multi-Channel Bonding embraces two radio channels simultaneously. It collapses the available channels from 12 to 6 for increased bandwidth on the available channels. Single and double channels are not run at the same time. This technology senses single channel and dual channel frames and negotiates time-based solutions with priority on single channel processing.

· Select Mode: Select Mode gives users the option of locking the Xtreme G products into a Static mode (instead of the default Dynamic mode) for even higher performance within a complete D-Link 108Mbps Xtreme G environment.

The D-Link Xtreme G firmware update for existing Atheros-based D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G wireless products is now available as a free download at the D-Link web site.