Wireless Gigabit Networking?
I ran across this article on Ars Technica concerning wireless gigabit networking. It seems at present that we can’t get these fast network speeds to go through walls. You may be happy with your wireless G (802.11g) with it’s 54 Mb/s speeds which is still faster than your internet connection. But what about moving files inside your house? More and more, home entertainment will mean moving huge video files (up to 8GBs for an hour show in Hi-Def) from your server to the device that plays them on the big screen TV in your living room. Wireless n speeds will handle streaming of this content (playing a video file while it’s being transmitted to your living room), but if you want to move the file from one computer to another, be prepared to drum your fingers for a few minutes while it moves at that snail’s pace.
I’ve wired my house for gigabit ethernet. I’ve found this to be more than four times faster than even wireless n. I was able to move a multi-gigabyte file from one Mac to another in less than a minute at roughly 400 Mb/s (megabits per second: a megabit is 1 million bits. 8 bits make a byte. Megabytes and gigabytes are abbreviated with a capital B thus: MB & GB. A byte is what it takes to represent one character or in a computer.)
I do hope that someday, WiFi will surpass wired networks in speed. Cables and wires are the bane of our technological existence. But this bit of news is disappointing to that end.
