Fully 802.11n products

1) Is there even a process for manufacturers to certify their products as 802.11n final? Pretty much everything today is only draft 2.0 certified, and it's already been several months since the final specification was ratified.

2) Are there any routers or wireless cards that support the full 802.11n spec? As in dual-band, quad-stream and capable of (theoretically) getting the full 600 Mbps throughput.

 

No easy way to find these. The best is to use advanced search on WiFi Alliance website. The problem is "802.11n" means both draft n and final n so you need to either go by date (search for those certified after 802.11n has been finalized) or open PDF files with certificate that are attached.
It's definitely not the easy way but at least there is one place where you can find it for sure.

http://www.wi-fi.org/search_products.php?advanced=1&en

 

Wow, there aren't very many products that have been certified between November 1st last year and today. I was expecting all the equipment makers to push out a brand new lineup from top to bottom the minute N became final, but it seems only Apple has done so.

 

My understanding is that almost all draft N items have been grandfathered to full N status.

Besides this, it takes a while for packaging to catch up. New packaging costs money and N products are selling fine, especially when you consider most are saying their stuff only works optimally when paired with their own products. Once N is certified on the box, they lose this marketing advantage.

 

I don't believe it's the case as there were two versions of draft n. If I remember correctly one was called "draft n" and the other "Draft n" (with the capital letter) the latter being draft 2.0
There was also an attempt of draft n that was not issued by WiFi alliance but by companies who disagreed with proposed "draft n" at the time.
All in all that's pretty complicated and getting the final version would be easier.

 

Not a single one of these products supports full N speeds though. Most are dual-stream (300 Mbps), with a handful being triple-stream (450 Mbps). Sadly, I don't think any of the final-N certified products are quad-stream (the full 600 Mbps) either, so I suppose that the answer to part 2 of my original question is "no" for now.

Very complicated indeed, which is why I expected the manufacturers to simply replace everything at once, overnight, with a final-N lineup.

 

There seems an awful lot of BS when it comes to Wi-Fi, USB, Firewire & more so when you are trying to fathom out what sort of difference new'upgrades' might make to your otherwise not so up to date laptop/PC etc.

Eye Fi have just announced an 'n' version of their SDHC Wi-Fi cards. It would be just my luck for me to get those and rush to upgrade my spare (non 'n') Wi-Fi router, only to find out that the range and transmission speeds from my camera at an event photography 'gig', varied only very slightly from simply sticking with a normal (not G+ type either) a/b/g type router.

Every year I get more and more cynical. Yet SOMETIMES I do genuinely find something that does not 'bottleneck' way before the BS 'theoretical' max speed. Same with card readers, latest 2.5" hard drives over older IDE ones, etc etc. People have to put LOADS of info on food packaging these days - but you can make all sorts of BS speed claims and get away with it, depsite maybe sometimes as low as 1 or 2% of buyers having the configurations, latest equipment and I.T. savvyness to actually gain anything major.

I have not used 'n' Wi-Fi ... and would love to be told / proved my ramblimgs are WELL out of date now ??

 

One of the fastest cards so far is the Intel 5300 which is capable of 450, I have yet to hear of a quad.

One company has managed to demonstrate a throughput of nearly 450, however, it is only under certain circumstances.

 

You need both an N router and an N wireless card to get any benefit whatsoever out of N. If either one is not N-capable, then both default to "legacy" G mode.

As for tall marketing claims that border on false advertising... At least the wi-fi alliance is honest about what you can realistically expect out of products. Go take a look at the LCD monitor market sometime for comparison - you'd be surprised at how little the specs monitor manufacturers give correlate to reality

I suppose this means that N still has some room left for growth then, despite its age and "obsolete the moment it was finalized" status.

 

I recommend you guys read a bit about 802.11n, because it sounds like there is confusion on exactly what this means. There is no requirement that equipment must be built to go up to 600Mbps. There are 32 modulation/coding schemes that run the gamut from real slow, and only 6 of them are under 54Mbps. Then of course you have different channel widths, guard interval time lengths and of course both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz spectrums.
Speeds with a max of 150Mbps, 300Mbps, 450Mbps, and 600Mbps all qualify under the standard.

The difference of course is the higher speed you want, the "ugly" it looks. IIRC, more streams require more unique antennas. It's not exactly easy to stuff 4 WiFi antennas in a laptop (and then throw in even more for WWAN, etc). Plus the faster equipment almost certainly is more expensive to manufacture in APs.

I know D-Link announced a 3-stream 450Mbps DAP-1560. They made it sound like just in time so you can lounge outside with faster WiFi on a summer day