The iPhone 4’s Weakest Link: the Network

by jepstein on June 15, 2010

Steve Jobs is a master at showmanship–not just in his presentations, but with the products his company, Apple, creates.  A goal that was seen in the original Macintosh but taken to near completion with the iPhone and iPad, Apple has sought to completely own the user experience, integrating various parts together into a seamless package where every detail has a purpose.  And his successes have shown that this vision is right; it’s the user experience that matters, not what cool features this component or that can do. [click to continue…]

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Grading the WLAN Spectrum Analysis Architectures

by jepstein on June 9, 2010

With the recent series of announcements by enterprise WLAN vendors about including spectrum analysis into their products, let’s dig a little deeper into spectrum analysis and see what matters and how things add up.

First off, the basics. Spectrum analyzers that are built into Wi-Fi networks are designed to detect the presence of—and identify—sources of non-Wi-Fi interference in the Wi-Fi unlicensed spectrum. Given the way that Wi-Fi works and how it uses unlicensed spectrum, there are many non-Wi-Fi devices that generate emissions that can severely cripple network throughput.

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Gigabit Wi-Fi? Really?

by jepstein on May 10, 2010

There has been a fair amount of recent news coverage of a faster version of Wi-Fi coming, called WiGig and capable of greater than 1Gbps.

WiGig is an IEEE 802.11 amendment, specifically 802.11ad, for 60GHz operation at greater than a gigabit speed. The high-frequency spectrum used prevents the network from reaching through walls or around corners, and thus is really targeted for home entertainment (such as a wireless HDMI replacement). Nevertheless, through our position in the Wi-Fi Alliance, with whom the WiGig Alliance just agreed to work closely with, and IEEE, we are monitoring the development of this new technology. At the moment, it does not seem that this technology will have significant enterprise applicability.

IEEE has a companion project, 802.11ac, for gigabit operation within the standard Wi-Fi spectrum. This amendment builds upon 802.11n, to provide higher throughput by, in part, using even wider channels and more than four spatial streams. This technology is just in the exploratory stages, and it will be a few years before it reaches commercial products. We are closely monitoring the developments there as well.

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What is a network assurance platform, you ask?

October 13, 2009 Behind the Lab Coats

For wireless networking to succeed in taking over from Ethernet, it has to become dependable—as dependable as wires. People will look back at the development of WLANs to now—even with the launch of 802.11n—and think of the time as the “early days”. This may sound surprising, with WLANs so prevalent in our [...]

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Electronic Medical Records and Wireless LAN

October 5, 2009 Industry Insights

With latest politics surrounding Healthcare reform, it is good to see there is interest in helping hospitals increase productivity and reduce errors by investing into Electronic Medical Records (EMR).  A recent post on Yahoo News is that Vice President Joe Biden plans to announce a nearly $1.2 billion in grants to help hospitals transition to [...]

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802.11n – A long time coming (short chronicle of the 802.11n ratification history)

September 15, 2009 Industry Insights

One may ask why it took two years for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 working group to produce the final standard of 802.11n, when an interoperable and practicable Draft 2.0 was available back in 2007.  The answer involves peeling back the layers of the operation of the IEEE standards development organization.
IEEE [...]

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Have you heard of 1×1, single stream 802.11n? Is it 802.11n?

September 14, 2009 Industry Insights

802.11n standard, final ratification by IEEE expected on Sep 11, 2009, increases the effective network capacity by up to 10x compared to legacy 802.11a/b/g.  One of the key enhancements introduced in 802.11n is the use multiple spatial streams based on multiple input, multiple output (MIMO).  MIMO refers to the number of transmit and receive antennas [...]

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802.11n APPROVED! Official Notification!

September 11, 2009 Industry Insights

After exactly six years, almost a dozen drafts, and two years of enterprise products available under Wi-Fi Alliance certification, IEEE has today approved the ratification of 802.11n as a final standard.
Here is the official notification!
Editor’s note: We’ll be celebrating next week with another Tweepstakes giving away a laptop of the FUTURE! Stay [...]

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Draft 2.0, Draft 11.0 – What’s the DIFS?

September 9, 2009 Industry Insights

Image by » Zitona « via Flickr

editor’s note: Feel free to groan about the title, @joelvincent came up with it
With 802.11n ratification upon us, a number of people are wondering what the differences are between Draft 2.0 of 802.11n and the final standard.  Draft 2.0, as most of you know, is the basis [...]

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When it comes to WLAN architectures a computer manufacturer said it best: “Think Different”

September 3, 2009 Industry Insights

Image via Wikipedia

Most networks today (wireless or wired) need to support the following.

High availability
Pervasive non-stop coverage/access
High density areas
Mission critical applications
Demanding SLAs
Ease of management

There are two prevailing WLAN architectures – channel layering and adaptive channel/power, both of which attempt to maximum the use of all bandwidth available to WiFi devices.  To do this effectively, co-channel interference [...]

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